Description
The rise of civilisational states, such as China and Russia, is reshaping global politics and challenging liberal norms. Current discourses either nuance the essentialism of ‘civilisation’ by linking it to state practices or develop relational accounts focusing on the agential role of great powers and smaller states. Christopher Coker provides insights into how great powers deploy civilisational narratives, while Amitav Acharya and Andrew Phillips explore agency through localisation and customisation processes. However, this paper argues that these approaches do not fully capture the emergent dynamics of integration processes—both planned and unplanned—that redefine global alignments and shape smaller states like Hungary and Serbia.
Building on Andrew Linklater’s work on the contradictions of integration processes and the symbolic dimensions of civilising processes, this paper identifies three critical dynamics shaping these transformations: symbolic syncretisation, state-formation, and nation-formation. These processes illuminate how symbolic, institutional, and ideological shifts within smaller states deepen their alignment with civilisational powers and their normative orbits. For example, Serbia’s democratic backsliding reflects both domestic political transformations and the gravitational pull of civilisational states offering alternative governance models and narratives of pride and sovereignty. Such transformations challenge the Liberal International Order (LIO) not only through strategic recalibrations, but also through cultural, governance, and normative changes, reinforced by contradictions within the LIO itself.
This paper critiques traditional binaries of democracies vs. autocracies and Cold War-inspired concepts like balancing and bandwagoning, arguing instead for a relational, process-oriented approach to understanding how integration processes reshape global politics. By bridging Global IR, Hierarchy Studies, and Process Sociology, it challenges deterministic accounts of an inevitable return to realpolitik espoused by some realists and national-populists. Ultimately, it argues that recognising the contradictions and incompleteness of these integration processes is essential to mitigating global fragmentation and fostering alternative pathways for coexistence in a multipolar, multicivilisational world.
