It has been roughly a decade since civilizational ethno-politics emerged as a significant geopolitical and geoeconomic issue. It has gradually built momentum, and in 2025-26 new landmarks appeared: Russia’s new Migration Policy Concept, China’s Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, and the Trump administration’s worries about European “civilizational erasure” and “reverse colonization” by non-European immigrants. While some of these moves — not in China, of course, which like most East Asian nations tightly restricts immigration — can be attributed to increases in immigrant populations, that phenomenon is disappearing. Even the absorbent US seems to have hit the point of negative net immigration (more people leaving than arriving). Civilizational identity politics could become a lonely pursuit.
What makes this geoeconomically significant is that China, Russia, the US and Europe all have stagnating working-age populations, sometimes with high unemployment (China, Russia, EU), sometimes with low (US). Population stagnation makes economic growth more difficult, particularly with an ever-higher median age. SIG’s view is that stability and prosperity will depend on a new wave of globalization that can improve productivity in demographically stagnant countries, particularly those capable of large-scale war. This will be very challenging indeed given the current tendency of large powers to turn in on themselves.
One could argue that tendency began in India and Europe. In 2019, India passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which fast-tracked citizenship applications by nearly everyone except Muslims. The government of Narendra Modi has stressed Hinduism as the core of India’s “civilizational state.” Also in 2019, EU president Ursula von der Leyen created a post of vice-president for “Protecting our European Way of Life.” This person was responsible for migration, integration and security. The controversial title was later changed. But the trend did not really weaken. Anti-immigrant parties have continued to prosper in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria and elsewhere. Modi-style Hindu majoritarianism is not waning; it may even be spreading into Nepal.
Russia began, in a foreign policy concept paper, to describe itself as “a unique country-civilization” in 2022, in tandem with its invasion of Ukraine, which was premised in part on the idea that Russia was intervening on behalf of ethnic Russians in Ukrainian territory. Russia’s “Migration Policy Concept 2026-2030” aimed at reducing immigration by Central Asians and attracting foreigners who shared “traditional moral and spiritual values.” China’s move toward assimilation of minorities to the dominant culture of the Han majority began soon after Xi Jinping became Communist Party general secretary (2012) and culminated in 2026 with the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress.
American policy moves toward similar goals have been scattered and contradictory, but immigration policy in the current Trump administration has aimed fairly openly at returning to the Europeans-only template that ended with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The administration has granted refugee status almost exclusively to white South Africans and plans to do the same in 2027. The administration’s rhetoric about threats to European civilization is informed by an assumption that the US itself is among Europe’s “civilizational allies” and part of what Vice President Vance has called “our civilization.”
This isn’t just about immigrants. While the EU, US and Russia have brought about a shrinkage in their immigrant populations through policy changes and enforcement, neither China nor India has had significant immigration (although India has hosted large refugee populations). China and India are using domestic policy to create an ever-stronger core by assimilating domestic populations outside that core. The EU, US and Russia have been more exclusionary or expulsive, as through deportations. In all cases the result is internal, domestic pressure toward a type of conformity. The other result is a failure to achieve population growth.
It’s the demographic stagnation that points toward the coming challenge for these emerging ethno-civilizations: how to grow. AI is the dream-machine solution, promising productivity growth through substitution of machine thinking for human thinking and electric power for human power. The other solution is expansion abroad. But the enthusiasm for expansion beyond borders is not great. Enthusiasm for investment abroad is a different matter. The political pressure for keeping domestic capital domestic contrasts with the market pressure to invest outside markets that are running short on both supply and demand. The self-sufficient ethno-civilization model is clearly very attractive to many people and governments, but market forces, especially if the AI genie fails to deliver, will nonetheless push capital outward.