Pope Leo XIV’s historic visit to Türkiye, especially Iznik, to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, and following the Lebanon visit, has focused on the symbolism: Christianity still carries a shared spiritual core and a common creed that stretches far beyond contemporary Western boundaries. At the same time, the Ecumenical Patriarch’s recent tour of the United States in September 2024, and joining the commemoration along with Pope Leo XIV in Iznik, highlights Orthodoxy’s own global presence as an ecumenical authority. This stands in sharp contrast to the Russian Orthodox Church, which has fused religion and nationalism and declared holy war in the Ukraine war, advancing a civilizational project built on the “Russian World” doctrine against the West.
This unity-and-division dispute is not only specific to the Christian and Western world but also to the rest of the world.
In the Islamic world, earlier civilizational initiatives – from Iranian President Khatami’s 1998 Dialogue of Civilizations initiative to the U.N.-backed Alliance of Civilizations in 2005, led by Türkiye and Spain – opened space for faith-based diplomacy. In contrast, the U.S.-driven Abraham Accords, aimed at securing Israel, attempted to fabricate an "Abrahamic civilization" concept as a geopolitical shortcut, a narrative later shattered by the Gaza genocide.
China has entered this arena as well, using President Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative to promote inclusiveness and mutual learning among different civilizations, and advocating respect for the diversity of world civilizations. This approach also raises questions about Beijing’s internal policies.
Taken together, these parallel moves raise the question of the relationship between civilization and politics.
The post-Cold War order promised universal norms and open markets shared by all. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama told us that “history” had reached its final destination: the modern liberal democratic system.
While that illusion has faded, we often forget the ecumenical roots of Fukuyama’s discourse. The Hegelian inspiration for Fukuyama’s progressive thesis was ultimately a secularized form of Christian universalism, assuming that liberal democracy could replace the unifying glue once provided by religion. Yet, that presumed “surpassed” phase is now returning, revealing not linear progress but circular history: Ibn Khaldun, not Hegel.
This turn to civilization is not new. From political scientist Samuel Huntington’s civilizational thesis to contemporary political shifts – most visibly in the rise of the far right in the West and the rhetoric of MAGA in the U.S. – the civilizational perspective is gaining renewed force, in contrast to the more peaceful discourse of the Pope. It is reshaping how states and civilizational actors understand and influence security, identity, nationhood, civilization and the global order.
Russia and China both claim civilizational authority, yet neither aims to be part of any universal part of civilization or center of this discourse. Their projects are constrained by the territorially sui-generis nation-state context they pretend to transcend.
Russia’s Orthodox narrative has not accepted the hierarchy and no mechanism for unity, but more controversies with the Ecumenical Patriarch’s recognition of the Ukrainian Church and religious legitimization of war in Ukraine.
China’s dilemma is different but no less revealing. Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative praises pluralism, yet Beijing demands that religious communities sever foreign ties. The Sinicization of Islam and Christianity exposes the gap between China’s civilizational rhetoric and its uncompromising nationalism.
China’s modern identity sits on a quiet tension: Tianxia, the old universal ideal of “all under heaven,” once framed China as a universal civilizational center. But the rise of Zhōngguó, the “central state,” pulled China into the territorial logic of the nation-state, narrowing its universal ambitions into a national project. China faces the growing presence of Christianity and resilient Muslim communities, forcing it to balance these universal religions with its own national identity model.
If Christianity is treated as one civilization, neither Russia’s nationalized Orthodoxy nor China’s managed diversity can uphold its unity.
The nation-state still rules, which is driving the concept of civilization in different contexts.
The Middle East is the birthplace of the Abrahamic religions, and Muslims have historically embraced that shared lineage. But the Gaza war shattered the political project of an “Abrahamic civilization” for securing and legitimizing the colonization policies of Israel in the Middle East.
The Abraham Accords were a top-down power arrangement that bypassed the majority of the Islamic world and particularly Palestine, the region’s deepest moral and political fault line, and their narrative collapsed the moment Israel’s genocide on Gaza exposed the emptiness of the project.
Across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, states are empowering non-Western networks, from BRICS and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), alongside expanding energy and trade corridors such as NATO member Türkiye’s nuclear partnership with Russia or the Saudi-Iran detente under China’s mediation, showing that the world is witnessing middle powers’ multivector policies.
Meanwhile, the West faces a demographic collapse it cannot solve without immigration, yet its politics reject migrants and fuel rising xenophobia. This contradiction may push Western leaders toward a new demographic strategy: attracting global Christian populations as a “civilizationally acceptable” alternative – as seen in U.S. President Donald Trump’s appeal to white South African Christians. But such a shift could easily evolve into a new form of interventionism, justified as the “protection of Christians abroad,” echoing the pressures the Ottoman Empire faced in the 19th century.
Civilizational narratives are returning in global politics, driven by a fragmented West, rising non-Western powers and the erosion of the liberal order’s universal claims. Whether these competing civilizational projects can produce a shared moral framework and peaceful relations, or merely harden divisions in an already unstable world, remains to be seen.
