The article is devoted to the analysis of the methodological resource of the civilization approach at the modern stage of the historical process. Taking into account the categorical development of the concept of civilization, the author focuses on two groups of socio-cultural characteristics: unique and universal. The unique characteristic reflects the distinctive, special and original features of a certain historical type of society that is being studied in social and cultural aspects. The universal characteristic represents common institutional features of a civilizational form of a social organization. The article draws attention to the fact that the semantic symbolic representation of the word “civilis” in the Latin language in the meaning of “civil” or “state” gives grounds to distinguish a state, a state power and a public administration as one of the key criteria of civilizational status and a universal civilizational component of the construction of civilizational models. According to the author of the article, the consequence of this statement is the prevalence of a political aspect in the design and implementation of modern civilization projects in the context of globalization, which is confirmed, for example, by the content of the concepts of the European and Eurasian perspective of Russia. The logic of the author's argumentation leads to the separation of the contradiction between the expansion of the integration and communication content of economic processes and the preservation of the dominance of the political form of their management in the dynamics of international integration. The exacerbation of the noted contradiction contributes to the increased risk of nuclear military conflict because the state systems as the agents of political decisions, have armed forces in their structure, and the subjects of political power do not exclude war as a way to resolve the contradictions. All this calls into question the postmodern project of a united universal civilization. In conclusion, the author proposes to focus on the cultural and moral basis of the historic movement of the mankind and in this context, the formation of an internal, psycho-physical taboo on the killing of his own kind in every person.