The Russkii mir and the Anglosphere: co-constructing a world of civilisations?

Putinism has now consolidated into an official ideology built around the concept of the ‘state-civilisation’. That purported civilisation is the ‘Russkii mir’—the ‘Russian world’—made up of multiple ethnicities/nationalities supposedly united through the Russian language, common values, and a sense of shared past, present, and future. It faces a common external threat—the ‘collective West’—within which a special contempt is held for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ states, usually denoting the USA and the UK, but potentially including other states of the ‘Anglosphere’. These ideas are built on a meta-conception of a multipolar world comprising culturally defined civilisations which should cooperate, but may clash, especially if one of them seeks global hegemony. This article shows how the Eurasianist ideology of the ‘Russkii mir’ concept and the concept of the Anglosphere are examples of civilisationalism. It argues that there is a danger that the two concepts are co-constructing a world of clashing civilisations. However, through analysing the concepts’ inherent contradictions, their neo-imperialist elements and nationalist resistances to them, and the instrumental uses of the concepts, it argues that they are unlikely to become deep-seated and prevalent world-views.