Rethinking Strategic Analysis for a Multipolar World: From Nation-State to Civilization-State

Strategic analysis, as most of our institutions still teach and practice it, rests on premises inherited from the Westphalian and Cartesian moment of European modernity. They suited a world of nation-states competing inside one normative order. They do not suit a multipolar order whose main poles increasingly define themselves as state-civilizations, Lorenzo Maria Pacini writes.

Many of the great strategic misjudgments of the last thirty years began as analytical successes. The models held together, the data were accurate, the assessments came with confidence. Western policy communities expected market integration to bring political convergence in China, post-Soviet Russia to become a large European nation-state, and regime removal in Iraq and Libya to open the way to liberal institutions. None of these expectations failed for lack of information. They failed because of the lens through which the information was read.

Strategic analysis, as most of our institutions still teach and practice it, rests on premises inherited from the Westphalian and Cartesian moment of European modernity. They suited a world of nation-states competing inside one normative order. They do not suit a multipolar order whose main poles increasingly define themselves as state-civilizations. More data and faster tools will not close the gap. What’s needed is a change in how we know
and in how we work.

Four hidden premises

Every analytical tradition carries assumptions it no longer sees. Conventional strategic analysis has four.

The first is the unit of analysis: the sovereign nation-state, legally equal to every other. A multipolar system cannot treat every formally sovereign state as a pole. Real poles are far fewer than states, and for most states sovereignty over questions of world order is close to a legal fiction.

The second is space. Our maps of capabilities and deployments treat space as homogeneous and measurable: the res extensa of early modern philosophy, a historical construct of Western Europe that schools and universities spread until it looked like the only possible idea of space. The actors we study do not live in a Cartesian grid. A strait or a holy city carries a weight no metric captures.

The third is time. Much forecasting still assumes one line of development along which every society moves toward the same destination, usually market democracy, so that other societies appear “behind” and bound to catch up. Convergence theory is this assumption applied to strategy.

The fourth, and least visible, is the observer: the view from nowhere, the analyst who believes he stands outside the system he describes. Intelligence professionals call the practical result mirror-imaging, the habit of assuming the other side reasons as we do. Along the past century, ethnocentrism has been a source of strategic error, never solved because it was treated as a bias of individual analysts when it’s a structural feature of the discipline.

The State-Civilization

These premises matter more now because the main actors of the emerging order no longer describe themselves as nation-states.

By state-civilization I mean a political unit that grounds its legitimacy and strategic purpose in a civilizational self-understanding of long duration, holds several peoples, faiths or languages within one political form, and claims the right to its own normative order instead of accepting a universal one. It’s a different kind of political subject, not a larger nation-state.

Official documents now say so: Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept of March 2023 defines the country as a “unique country-civilization” and a “Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power”. In China the civilizational reading of the state moved from a critical remark by Western scholars to an explicit political programme, and Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia, “all under heaven”, proposes a world order founded on relational rationality: existence presupposes coexistence. India offers comparable self-descriptions, where the civilizational state is one of the defining political forms of the century.

Whether these self-descriptions are historically accurate is a fair question, and critics argue that civilizational language can legitimize claims over neighbouring states. The debate strengthens my point. A self-description that shapes doctrine, education, alliances and the use of force is a strategic fact, whatever its accuracy. Every political society as a cosmion, a small world of meaning lit from within by its own self-interpretation. An analyst who studies only its budget, its fleet and its GDP, is measuring the walls of a building without knowing what happens inside.

Three epistemological moves

The first move is from the view from nowhere to situated observation. Relativity and quantum mechanics showed that the observer’s position shapes what is observed; geopolitics is no exception. Each school reads the common map from the civilization it belongs to. The Russian school calls this geopolitical subjectivity, and on that basis distinguishes a geopolitics of the Sea, one of the Land, and the shifting geopolitics of the coastal belt between them. Decolonial thought reached a comparable conclusion: one culture’s vision cannot pass as universal rationality without imposing a provincialism as universalism.

Situated observation is not relativism, it does not hold that all assessments are equally valid, it holds that an assessment which declares its coordinates is more reliable than one which hides them.

The second move is from quantitative to qualitative space. A state-civilization organizes its territory by centre and periphery, by sacred places, by frontiers of memory. The analyst has to map which spaces a civilization treats as its core, which as a buffer, which as a wound. Two lines of equal length on a map can carry very different probabilities of escalation.

The third move is from individual to relational rationality. Classical realism treats its interest-maximizing actor as universal, yet that actor is itself a historical figure. One need not accept, normatively, that coexistence outranks self-interest in order to take the analytical warning: actors may weigh status, historical memory or religious obligation differently from the utility calculus we assign them. A forecast that ignores this will be precise and wrong.

Six changes in method

All of this need a methodological change, also. First, a dual unit of analysis. Beside the state, analysts should work with the civilizational space, Carl Schmitt’s Grossraum, as a level in its own right, with its core, its periphery, its internal diversity and its lines of contact with other spaces.

Second, renewed strategic culture studies. Jack Snyder introduced the concept at RAND in 1977 to explain Soviet nuclear thinking, and Alastair Iain Johnston gave it a rigorous research design in 1995. The field faded after the Cold War, just as it was becoming indispensable. It should be reconnected to civilizational analysis through systematic study of doctrine, historiography, school curricula and religious and philosophical canons.

Third, hermeneutic reading. Founding narratives, official concepts, commemorations and the vocabulary of legitimacy are not decoration. They are the grammar of future decisions. If you know the grammar, you can write that future.

Fourth, multi-observer analysis. Techniques such as the analysis of competing hypotheses should be extended: critical assessments produced by teams trained to reason from within different traditions, with their divergences treated as data rather than noise. Divergence shows where our own perspective is most likely to deceive us.

Fifth, plural time horizons. State-civilizations plan and remember in decades and centuries. Doctrinal constants, persistent geographic priorities and recurring alliance patterns belong beside electoral and budget cycles in any serious assessment.

Sixth, calibration. The real risk of the civilizational approach is essentialism: a civilization treated as a fixed essence that explains everything and therefore nothing. The remedy is discipline. Hypotheses must be stated with calibrated confidence, tied to observable indicators and dropped when the indicators contradict them.

Potential objections

Does this revive the clash of civilizations? No. Samuel Huntington used civilizations to predict fault lines of conflict; this approach uses them to reduce misunderstanding.

Are civilizations not plural and contested? They are. Russian, Chinese and Indian civilizational discourses are not single voices, and tracking their internal tensions is part of the method.

Can civilizational language serve as cover for domination? It can, and no analyst should adopt an actor’s self-description uncritically. The answer is critical study, not dismissal. An analyst who refuses to take civilizational self-understanding seriously does not become more objective, he loses the capacity to anticipate.

A science of many positions

Strategic analysis was born as the science of one position, that of the maritime West looking at the rest of the world. While that position coincided with the centre of power, its blind spots cost little. In a multipolar order they cost far more, because the actors we misread are able to act on their own reading of the world.

Re-grounding the discipline means declaring the observer’s position, mapping space as actors live it, reading rationality in the plural, and building methods that can hold several civilizational perspectives at once without dissolving into relativism. Universities, think tanks and intelligence services need analysts who read languages, history and philosophy as well as spreadsheets.

The question is no longer whether the world has become multipolar, it’s whether our way of knowing the world will become multipolar in time.