A fair piece, especially on the concept of 'civilisation-state' vs 'nation-state'. All three of China, India and Russia can be understood as the former, given

A fair piece, especially on the concept of 'civilisation-state' vs 'nation-state'. All three of China, India and Russia can be understood as the former, given that they are each formerly multi-ethnic, multi-national empires who chaotically arrived at republicanism without fragmenting into their constituent ethnic groupings. The comparator is probably the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, each of which collapsed after WWI, producing many of the states we see today in Europe / Middle East. Those collapses were horrifically traumatic - Armenia genocide, multiple Balkan wars (which arguably continue to this day in Kosovo), multiple Greece-Turkey wars, as well as of course decades of strife in the Middle East. It's unclear whether the nationalisms of China or India are the main factors threatening the world order though - economic growth of both countries + population size is a much greater factor that is disturbing that apple cart. Furthermore, both nationalisms seem to be turned inward, rather than outward. Despite media narrative, neither China nor India are particularly expansionist, the populism that is there looks like an attempt to ward off the future threat of fragmentation rather than acquiring new territory