Hey folks! Fireside this week. I had wanted to have my post on the hoplite debate (the othismos over othismos) ready for this week, but it’s not quite done, so I am shifting that to next week. So instead this week I want to outline another debate in ancient military history, the ‘Roman strategy debate.’ I thought I’d do this in a Fireside because a Patron asked about it and seemed perplexed that it was a debate (me too, buddy, me too) but I can’t really give it a full ACOUP treatment because I have something formal working its way down the pipe and I wouldn’t want to steal my (and my co-author’s) thunder. But what I can do is summarize what the debate is about and why it seems so stuck lately.
I would summarize the core question of the ‘Roman strategy debate’ thusly: “to what degree were the Romans able to engage in strategy and strategic decision-making in their military and foreign policy and to what degree did they do so?” Put a bit more bluntly: did the Romans ‘do strategy’ and indeed could they: did they have both the social-cultural framework to think strategically and did they have the political institutions for central, strategic policy-making?
This is one of those debates that is a bit tricky because the intuitive ‘modernizing’ response is to assume that because our culture thinks about foreign policy in strategic terms (sometimes) that all cultures must and therefore the Romans must and thus the whole debate is silly. And that tends to be the lay-person’s immediate response to the whole thing. But this is a classic trap of assuming things are timeless human universals a priori without first demonstrating they are. So “of course the Romans thought strategically” is, left at that, a bad argument. What makes it tricky is that it is also right in its conclusions and there’s a danger of falling out the other side grumbling about how ‘only academics could be so stupid’ (a near direct quote of one of the strategy advocates below) as to look for proof that the Romans understood foreign policy in strategic terms.
The debate starts in 1976 with Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976). Luttwak’s argument, at its core, is that looking archaeology he can discern distinct periods of recognizable strategic policy emerging out of the patterns of Roman frontier deployments and defenses (archaeologically visible in Roman forts), with the frontier transitioning from a series of forward-operating bases as launching pads for offensive or retaliatory action to a more rigid prohibitive frontier and then finally to a defense-in-depth operational zone over about four centuries from Augustus to late antiquity. Luttwak was thus arguing that the Romans had long-term strategies, consistent across wide geographic areas and over multiple emperors, that they employed in defending their frontier.
Now here, in the debate (as elsewhere) personalities matter. Luttwak’s book made a big splash and was and is still influential, but it had three strikes against it for a friendly reception by classical scholars. What gets mentioned first, because it is simple, is that Luttwak was not a ‘member of the guild,’ as it were: he was not a classicist, nor a historian, but an IR political scientist who had come up in the think-tank policy world and so this book was an ‘intrusion from an outsider.’ I don’t think that alone need have been fatal – other ‘outsider intrusions’ have been more kindly met – but for the other two strikes.
The next of these is an avoidable but predictable consequence of the first: the book was sloppy. It treats its sources sometimes carelessly, it avoids rather than develops nuance, and Luttwak himself essentially takes the actual granular archaeological data, reduces it to simplified models (presented visually in the book) and then reasons from those. It’s not just that Luttwak isn’t a classicist, but that he does not show the sort of painstaking detail-oriented care historians and classicists are supposed to and so makes a great many tiny missteps, none of which collapse the whole argument but all of which are annoying. Sloppy. And then, finally, Edward Luttwak is a deeply disagreeable person, bluntly and openly contemptuous of the skills and capabilities of his interlocutors, prone to telling tall-tales which aggrandize himself, and openly misogynistic – the sort of fellow who rants about “female PhDs” in print in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Twenty-Two.
An (over) reaction was guaranteed and not long in coming. If you want a good – and entertainingly written – summary of the reaction and counter-reaction, look for J.E. Lendon, “Primitivism and Ancient Foreign Relations” Classical Journal 97.4 (2002). The form the reaction took, I think, was shaped significantly by the scholarly environment of the 1970s and 1980s (although responses kept coming after that). We’ve talked about this before in regards to the ancient economy, but this was the golden age of ‘primitivism’ as a school of thought, a realization – eventually an overcorrection – that the ancients did not always think like us or share our assumptions and a consequent demand that scholars demonstrate from the sources that the Romans were even playing with the same concepts and assumptions we were.
So the critique of Luttwak that emerged was a fundamentally primitivist critique: that the Romans lacked the necessary conceptual framework to establish strategy policy along the lines that Luttwak was laying out, or at least they lacked the modern institutions to actually set and direct policy in such a clear and coherent way.
I should note that some of these responses struggle because they adopt an overly ambitious definition of strategy, demanding that ‘grand strategy’ be consistent between emperors (it need not be) or geographic regions (still no) or that it be purely rational (oh my no) or assign no value to non-material outcomes like ‘honor’ (nope). Strategy is simply the selection of a goal (‘ends’) and the coordination of methods (‘ways’) and resources (‘means’) to achieve that goal; grand strategy does not demand wider geographic or chronological reach, it is simply strategy that incorporates not only military and diplomatic resources, but also financial, economic, and demographic resources. “We should found a new colony here so that our armies can resupply there and the population can provide a local bulwark against unruly locals” is, in itself, without anything else grand strategy, coordinating economic (supply logistics, farming) demographic (creating a loyal local population) and military means to achieve a strategic end (local security).
Many of the classicists responding to Luttwak thus set the bar for strategy way too high and a result their rebuttals shot wide of the target because you can prove the Romans might be bad at strategy (or at least impaired in its execution) without proving they couldn’t or didn’t try to do it.
The strongest forms of this response, I’d argue, were B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire (1990) and S. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy (1999), though the attacks are a bit different and the latter more successful. Isaac is a ‘hard primitivist,’ in a nearly Finleyite mold: he will concede only that the Romans knew or understood or used the concepts we can see demonstrated in the sources and he will not fill in gaps, however plausible (or likely). So since no Roman source explicitly discusses using deserts, mountains, rivers or walls as defensible ‘scientific’ frontiers based on natural obstacles, he concludes they didn’t (even though that pattern is obvious in certain parts of the empire). It helps Isaac’s argument that he’s focused on the East (Luttwak was focused on the West) where the defensive patterns are less immediately obvious although I’d argue they are still clearly defensive patterns (predicated on different geographic and logistical concerns) that Isaac essentially wills himself not to see.
Isaac’s approach survived about three years before being comprehensively dismantled in spectacular fashion by Everett L. Wheeler in a two-part article, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy” JMH 57.1 and 57.2. Wheeler has a peerless command of the ancient sources – as Lendon quips, “about ancient military and Roman foreign affairs no man alive knows more” – and his double-article is a master-class in historical argumentation, going point by point and showing that the gaps Isaac identifies aren’t gaps at all, that the sources do demonstrate the concepts he thinks are missing in plain text, over and over again. Once again, personal factors intrude: Wheeler’s blow to Isaac’s argument was fatal, but the ghost of it survives in part because Wheeler wrote in the Journal of Military History, which most classicists do not read, so unless a classicist is doing serious work on the topic (and thus following up footnotes) they’ll meet Isaac and Isaac’s supporters, but perhaps not the glassed-from-orbit demolition of his argument.1
Mattern’s2 counterpoint came later and has survived better. Essentially Mattern’s argument is that the Romans are not ‘doing strategy’ in the way Luttwak imagines because they are not making decisions in those terms – moving pieces on maps, calculating state interest in security, revenues and such. Instead, Mattern notes that Roman leaders were not trained in military science but in philosophy, rhetoric, even poetry and the Roman empire simply lacked the institutions – war colleges, general staffs, foreign offices, planning bureaus and such – to plan strategically and to coordinate those plans over large geographic areas. I should note that I think Mattern actually oversteps a bit on this point for the simple if deceptive reason that it is Roman aristocrats of a literary bent who provide most of our evidence for the Roman imperial aristocracy, but that does not mean there were not more militarily focused Roman senators, merely that they did not write or their writings did not survive and thus we do know less about them. A lot of our understanding, for instance, on the Roman political career in this period is based on Pliny the Younger, not because he was typical, but because a lot of his writing survives, but of course that means he was atypically a literary type.
In any case, Mattern argues as a result that literary and rhetorical frameworks, rather than strategy, formed the basis for Roman defensive policy: the Romans didn’t think in security and revenues and defensive lines, but in terms of honor, reputation, fear, ethnic stereotypes and the like. Of course the problem, which Lendon hints at but doesn’t quite say in the aforementioned article, is that ‘honor’ and ‘fear’ are old-timey words for ‘credibility’ and ‘deterrence’ – you can end up re-inventing IR-realism here in different words. However for Mattern, this distinction, combined with Rome’s primitive institutions, meant that – while the Romans may have been able to conceive of strategic planning – they did not do it, being culturally predisposed to base their policy on honor and lacking the institutions for true strategic planning in any case.
And to be frank, the argument has been a bit stuck since then. Proponents of ‘Roman strategy’ often point out that ‘strategy’ as a concept is rather more modest than the primitivists would suppose and that Rome meets the definition (note for instance K. Kagan, “Redefining Roman Grand Strategy” JMH 70.2 (2006)), but typically noting that actions that result from strategy rather than the process that produced them (which is hard to document in the imperial period where we have little insight into the emperor’s decision-making). Meanwhile, opponents of the notion tend to continue to to alight on institutional or knowledge limitations, arguments you can see come out clearly in some of the chapters of F.S. Naiden and D. Raisbeck, Reflections on Macedonian and Roman grand strategy (2019) – very capably reviewed here – particularly Richard Talbert’s chapter on Roman geographic knowledge (or the lack thereof). The latest major broadside in all of this is J. Lacey, Rome: Strategy of Empire (2022), which doesn’t really move the argument forward: Lacy argues for Roman strategy by again presenting outcomes – “look at these forts, these troop movements, these decisions – how could they be random or uncalculated when they work so well?” Which is a decent point but not a new one – that is fundamentally the point Luttwak made in 1976 – and so unlikely to convince even if it is right.
My own view on this – and you are going to hear an echo of this complaint next week on hoplites too – is that not enough of the folks working on this topic have a solid grounding in comparative non-modern military history. The classicists are, by and large, all classicists and have very little firm foundation outside of that subfield, while Lacey and Luttwak are international relations scholars and that is a field that is relentlessly modern and modernizing in its outlook.3 But if you know something about how strategic policy was developed, shaped and implemented in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s into the 1700s – largely before much of the modern apparatus of strategic policy making was invented, but late enough that we can see the process very clearly (and where no one doubts that strategy is happening) – the question is clarified immensely: of course the Romans are doing strategy, albeit – as all polities will – doing it in a complex stew of internal politics, personality and individual concerns; Mattern is by no means wholly or even mostly wrong to stress these.
Indeed, they are doing strategy with institutions that look quite a lot like the institutions (and attitudes) of early modern strategy-making, under the sort of communications and coordination constraints that early modern states wrestled with. The British Parliament or the Dutch Stadtholder or the King of France could get new directives to governors and generals in the New World no faster than Augustus could get them to legati Augusti pro praetore in Germany. And yet they did strategy just fine.
But I ought not steal too much thunder from the aforementioned article in which I have made some rather small contribution alongside my co-author. Of course, if you want to follow the progress of that project as it moves (hopefully) towards eventual publication, Patrons get monthly updates on my professional activities – research, teaching, writings, etc.
On to Recommendations:
I suppose I ought to lead with some of the things mentioned here. If you are looking to get a handle on the Roman strategy debate, I think Lendon’s “Primitivism and Ancient Foreign Relations” CJ 97.4 (2002) is the best and most engaging summary of the first 30 or so years of it and available to anyone with access to JSTOR.
And you may be thinking, “but Bret, how – since you are so clever and talented – can you not realize that I am not a college student or faculty member and so do not have unlimited access to JSTOR?” Ah, but you actually do have a lot of access to JSTOR: free JSTOR accounts, available to all, allow for reading most of the content on JSTOR with a limit of one hundred articles per month. An enormous amount of scholarship in a wide range of fields is thus available to you, for free (albeit generally not the most recent issues of the journals in question).
More recently, a large international research team has just unveiled itiner-e, an amazing new project that mapped not only major Roman roadways, but minor ones as well. This is a really great project – most maps of the Roman road network only include the really major arterial roadways, but of course we’ve long known about many smaller. Even better, they’ve released a handy, easy to use map model of their research which you can use online, where you can click on any road segment and get a neat summary of what we have about it – if the location is secure or conjectured, if it has a name, what sources we have for it, etc. Visualizing not just the presence of roads but the density of them in certain areas really does help remind us that Roman power (and population) was not uniformly dense.
And of course there is also a new edition of Pasts Imperfect, with a keynote essay by Rhiannon Garth Jones on the Ottoman reception of Roman antiquity, including things like Suleyman the Magnificent staging a Roman triumph to reinforce his presentation of the Ottoman Empire as the valid successor state to Rome. Great stuff and a useful reminder that ‘the West’ was never the sole heir of classical antiquity or the Roman past.4
Finally for this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend T.E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won its Battles, 1954-1968 (2022), which seems well on its way to being something of a modern classic. Ricks presents a history of the civil rights movement through the 1950s and 1960s, not as a social history (though there is some of that) but as a military history, focused on the training, organization, discipline, tactics and strategy necessary for civil rights to succeed despite limited resources and in the face of intense resistance. He also discusses the strategic missteps made by white supremacist leaders that created opportunities for civil rights activists to exploit, making this a narrative of contest, rather than having a one-sided focus on the agency of activists.5
Each chapter (there are 13, plus an introduction and conclusion) reads as a campaign history of a specific effort in the struggle, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Memphis labor efforts during which Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In each, Ricks analyzes why the civil rights organizations either succeeded or – in some cases – fell short. He comes away with an emphasis on key factors for any movement attempting to produce large-scale mass change: training, discipline, organization (‘support structures’), planning, strategy and an orientation towards change and eventually reconciliation with those who were once opponents. One of the great values of the campaign-approach is that it makes visible to the reader what many, even at the time, could not see: the weeks and months and years of planning and preparation that went into each campaign, training activists and preparing them. Non-violence required tremendous training and discipline which in turn needed to be prepared; people are not, after all, non-violent by nature. And non-violence, in turn was a strategy and a necessary, effective one which frequently confused and outmaneuvered white supremacist authorities who were prepared for violent confrontations and utterly unprepared for non-violent ones.
The book is thus generally a good introduction to how strategic planning works in a context that isn’t quite ‘war’ (although Ricks in some ways understands this movement as something like a soft ‘civil war,’ albeit with one sided committed to non-violence, a reminder that the line between war and politics is very fuzzy because on some level it does not exist; drink!). But it is also an extremely valuable text for folks thinking about modern protest movements. There is a danger in modern protest movements of falling into a sort of ‘cargo cult activism’ where the most visible and memorable components of previous protests – signs, marches, songs, calls for a general strike, etc. – are imitated without an understanding of what those actions were intended to achieve. One thing that comes out very clearly in this book is that the leaders of the civil rights movement always had a very strong sense of what the goal was of any particular campaign and also how they would achieve it: protests were calibrated to exert pressure on the specific people or groups who were blocking or could enable the change desired. They were not irritable gestures or ‘letting off steam’ but calculated, targeted precision blows designed to strike, on by one, at the pillars that supported white supremacy’s legal manifestation in the United States. That model of training, discipline and strategy is a good one for any modern change-making movement to think long and hard on.
And that’s the week. Next week, hopefully, hoplites!
- It is also a factor that Everett Wheeler’s reputation, well-earned, for blunt, ruthless – bordering on cruel – honesty makes him a contentious figure in the field.
- Mattern, a highly capable classicist with a strong argument, even if I find it has problems, is, I believe, the dreaded ‘female PhD’ whose objections so angered Luttwak.
- Not, perhaps, unreasonably so, as those fields are primarily focused on implications for modern strategic practice.
- As an aside, but I would argue that a truly intellectually defensible definition of ‘the West’ that isn’t simply Christendom-in-disguise must include all of the heirs of Rome and thus include much of the Islamic world. I’d argue that definition of the ‘West’ actually works, as you are then dealing with a collection of societies that have a shared connection to Roman antiquity, whose farming and state traditions derive from the same sources (Egypt and Mesopotamia), a kingship tradition that has the same key touchstones (with traditions codified in Babylon and by the Achaemenids which still occur in modern monarchies) and where the dominant religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) derive from connected traditions. But of course most of the time folks talk about ‘the West’ their explicit purpose is other-izing the Islamic world, even when it makes no sense.
- Though it is not, I must note, a ‘both sides’ treatment at all: Ricks leaves us in no doubt, at any point, what ‘side’ he is on.
Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask this question, since it’s at best tangential to the subject matter of the post, but I was recently perusing a book by Caleb Carr in my uni’s international relations library and—well, is this guy well-regarded in military history at all? I don’t know if I can trust somebody with such a low opinion of Clausewitz.
I am not familiar with his work.
I took several classes with Caleb Carr in the early 2000’s and have read some of his books as well and while I very much liked him and appreciated the courses he taught I don’t think that he would consider himself a scholar in the sense the Dr. Deveraux is. I don’t know what the general opinion of him and his work is but he is very much writing for a mass audience and doing storytelling without the degree of rigour and analysis that even these posts have much less actual journal articles or books. Nothing wrong with that and as I said I liked him both personally and as an instructor it is just a different sort of material for a different purpose
> As an aside, but I would argue that a truly intellectually defensible definition of ‘the West’ that isn’t simply Christendom-in-disguise must include all of the heirs of Rome and thus include much of the Islamic world. I’d argue that definition of the ‘West’ actually works, as you are then dealing with a collection of societies that have a shared connection to Roman antiquity, whose farming and state traditions derive from the same sources (Egypt and Mesopotamia), a kingship tradition that has the same key touchstones (with traditions codified in Babylon and by the Achaemenids which still occur in modern monarchies) and where the dominant religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) derive from connected traditions. But of course most of the time folks talk about ‘the West’ their explicit purpose is other-izing the Islamic world, even when it makes no sense.
Hey now, it’s not always about otherising the Islamic world. Since WWII, it’s often been about otherising the parts of the world that used to be communist. Throughout the Cold War, people talked about conflicts between “The West” and the Second World. And today, we constantly hear about conflicts between Russia and “The West”, even though Russia is as Western as they come. Because to such people, “The West” is like “civilisation”: a vague term for all that is good and proper, with none of the bad stuff, whether the badness be derive from communism, ex-communism, or Islam. Again, we see this in how people describe Russia’s war of conquest as “barbaric” which must be opposed by “civilised” people… but, of course, launching a war on this scale is only possible for a civilisation unless you are the Mongols.
Oh, and nobody ever seems to include Africa in “The West” despite most of it being west of Istanbul, it having the westernmost part of the Old World in Western Sahara, and a history of Christianity older than that of Europe. Nor are the indigenous peoples of the America included despite them being even further west.
But going back to the otherising of Islam, I should note that Ian Morris reaches a similar conclusion as you in Why The West Rules ~ For Now. Morris’ book is controversial to say the least, and I suspect you have many issues with it. But still, Morris’ focus is on geography, and he spends the first two chapters grappling with how to even define “The West”, going back to Homo erectus. He considers, and rejects, arguments about distributions of Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as whether it has anything to do with Christianity or Graeco-Roman philosophy and culture. He ultimately draws the line at the Indus Valley, thus arriving at a definition of “The West” which includes all of the Islamic world except for Malaysia and Indonesia. Annoyingly, Morris doesn’t really consider Africa after the first chapter, but it’s still the most rigorous and consistent definition of “The West” I have yet seen. It’s good to see that a person of your calibre thinks similarly.
A lot of words refer to “cluster concepts” – a concept that is defined by a set of criteria, but no single criteria is either necessary or sufficient. It is convenient to have a word that refers loosely to that group of wealthy countries that keep being pulled together by combined self-interest (baring the odd spot of bother, like WWI and WWII).
That Switzerland is formally neutral, that Japan is sometimes in the concept and sometimes outside, etc, doesn’t deny the usefulness of the word, as seen by it being reinvented in the form “global north”, which is longer and no more geographically useful.
As I understand it, Global North and Global South are technical terms mostly to do with economics and overall well-being; they have as much to do with geography as the constellations have to do with the zodiac.
Global North has nothing at all to do with “The West”; as you note, Japan is in the Global North but nobody thinks it’s Western. Conversely, Argentina¹ is a Western country in the Global South.
¹and, for that matter, all American countries except for Canada and the USA
A cluster concept doesn’t have neat edges. A particular case can be included in the concept for some purposes and not for others. Presumably everyone agrees that since the Meiji-restoration, Japan has been mainly “western aligned”, minus WWII.
We could say “the West and ‘western aligned countries” but that’s wordy. We could come up with another acronym, but that lacks transparency. Or we can muddle through with a term that conveys the core of what we want, specifying further if the context requires it.
At the risk of adding another concept to our shaggy cluster, let me suggest that “the West” consists of countries whose philosophical inheritance derives from (i) classical Greece and Rome, (ii) Judeo-Christianity, and (iii) the 18th century Enlightenment. So Germany is in, because, for better or worse, both nationalism (very much) and socialism (sort of) are Enlightenment ideas, but Latin America is only on the fringe, Iberia and thus its colonies being rather distant from the Enlightenment, and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are “West-adjacent.”
@ey81,
I was with you until you got to “nationalism and socialism are Enlightenment ideas” and that somehow that makes them “Western” concepts. I’d *very strongly* disagree with that, although if you had said “Enlightenment liberalism” instead, or restricted yourself just to liberalism, I would largely agree.
I’m sure this is partly because I’m much more sympathetic to both nationalism and socialism than I am to liberalism, but more importantly it’s because I think nationalism and socialism are both *natural* to human thought in a way that liberalism isn’t. Yes, the way we conceptualize nationalism and socialism today are largely a product of the Western Enlightenment, but the ideas themselves, and the desires and problems that they’re meant to address, are not, I’d say they’re pretty intuitive to the human species. Whatever you think of them, they are plausible and, to many people, compelling answers to the problem of how to deal with a world with 1) multiple different ethnic groups and 2) limited resources, differing access to capital, and class conflict, respectively.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the great Western powers today are largely defined by capitalism (i.e. in opposition to socialism, communism etc.) and by cosmopolitan values (in opposition to nationalism), so calling nationalism and socialism ‘western ideas’ seems…..misplaced. If you’re a nationalist or a socialist today you are probably going to find yourself very much in ideological *opposition* to western countries, or at least to in opposition to most of what western countries have been about for most of the post-WWII era.
I get into arguments about this “nationalism is a Western idea” concept a lot, usually on social media with the Hindu right who aspire to what they call a ‘civilizational state’ instead, and I think it’s as silly and pernicious coming from them as anyone else.
Hector:
I guess we disagree, and disagreements of this nature can hardly be resolved in blog comments. I would deny absolutely that 4th century Romans, or 11th century Englishmen, or anyone else prior to about 1700, was influenced by anything we would call “nationalism,” which in one phrase I would define as the belief that a group of people with a common language and cultural heritage should have its own polity ruled by speakers of that language who share that heritage. I could write another sentence or two about socialism, but like I said, this is not an appropriate forum for nuanced exploration of such issues.
@ey81,
That’s fair, we can certainly agree to disagree. I would just note one thing though, not to argue, but just to clarify where I’m coming from. I think a lot of people on the “nationalist” side would not primarily disagree with you when it comes to the ,i>history. Though they might disagree on specific examples, and would certainly look to particular historical moments for inspiration, it would be hard to maintain that the nation state as we know it characterizes most of human history. I think they would primarily disagree with you on the prehistory, and would say that small, relatively ethnically homogeneous groups inhabiting particular defined territories (yes, even nomadic groups have defined territories) was absolutely how we lived for most of our existence as a species. (Obviously we can’t appeal to written history for evidence of that, so the debate would have to take place regarding what we can infer from genetics, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, to some extent possibly mythology and oral history, and maybe other fields). I think a lot of people would argue with you that modern nationalistic movements, and the modern nation state, are attempts to recreate primitive tribalism, just like socialist movements are in some sense an attempt to recreate the values of primitive communism, on a more advanced material basis.
“Japan is in the global North but nobody thinks it’s Western.”
Not true. William McNeill’s “The Rise of the West” (1963) includes Japan as an incipient member of “the West.”
“The West” can be roughly defined as “Western Europe and its (former) vassal states”. That why this definition includes both Canada and the US (former vassals of British Empire), as well as Japan (current vassal state of the US) and Australia (current vassal state of the UK). Latin American countries broke their ties to Spain and Portugal, and chose their own path long enough ago that they do not fit that definition.
By that definition, between the British, French and Dutch former empires, most of the world is “the West”.
Australia is a vassal but not Canada? Japan? I think you should explain this more fully
I strongly recommend not saying this to anyone actually from Australia, esp. if they’ve been drinking.
““The West” can be roughly defined as “Western Europe and its (former) vassal states”.
That would include Iran and Iraq, not to mention Mozambique and India, but not Finland or Greece. It might not include Germany, if you consider it to be in Central Europe.
It seems to me that I have heard it used mostly, but not exclusively, to mean one of the following:-
a) The United States and its democratic allies.
b) Europe and its former settlement colonies. What might be called Greater Europe.
c) Secondary civilizations of the Fertile Crescent.
These all strike me as meaningful concepts. Certainly at least as meaningful a concept as “strategy”.
This makes no sense.
It’s worth pointing out that South America got its independence from Spain/Portugal well after the USA did from Great Britain, so some kind of chronological cut-off that leaves the USA on the right side but not Latin America fails on its own terms. Not to mention Africa and southern/southeast Asia which became independent well after that, mostly in the mid-20th century.
Indeed, by that definition, pretty much the entire world outside the former USSR and Turkey would count as “the West.” Iran, China and Thailand might have escaped formal colonisation but could certainly have been considered “vassals” of one or other western European/American countries at some point or other.
As for Australia being a “vassal state” of the UK, it absolutely 100% is not. The two countries have friendly relations and close cultural links, but the UK has no power over Australian domestic affairs whatsoever and any influence it might have on Australian foreign policy is entirely reciprocal.
While Japan was occupied by the USA for a bit after the war, I can’t imagine they would take kindly to being described as an American vassal either.
“That why this definition includes both Canada and the US (former vassals of British Empire), as well as Japan (current vassal state of the US) and Australia (current vassal state of the UK). Latin American countries broke their ties to Spain and Portugal, and chose their own path long enough ago that they do not fit that definition.”
Please explain how Latin America has been independent of Europe long enough not to be a “former vassal” but the US has not.
I love how the counter-replies to you show why the Romans acted like patronage is actually just friendship. “Don’t tell the vassals that they’re vassals, they wouldn’t take it well!” Yeah wow what a novel thought.
Also the conflating of states that have close ties (not vassalage, can’t call it that) with those that used to but don’t anymore. Why wouldn’t the Islamic Republic of Iran be part of the West? It’s not like they had a revolution or anything. Truly a mystery. Perhaps it just wasn’t long enough ago because it’s impossible to conceive of a cutoff that isn’t temporal.
I love how the counter-replies to you show why the Romans acted like patronage is actually just friendship. “Don’t tell the vassals that they’re vassals, they wouldn’t take it well!” Yeah wow what a novel thought.
So, your argument is literally:
“You’re a vassal.”
“No I’m not.”
“Aha, denying you’re a vassal, that’s typical vassal behaviour.”
It’s like something out of the Simpsons (derogatory).
I want to propose a much simpler definition:
“The West” can be roughly defined as any nation whose military uses the 5.56×45mm or 7.62×51mm bullets for its service rifle (eg AR-15, FAL, G3), whilst “The East” involves any nation that uses 5.45x39mm or 7.62x39mm bullets for its service rifles (Kalashnikovs).
This both allows for strategic concerns (If war breaks out, whose side do you expect to be fighting on? You’d want to share your bullets with those people – or alternatively, if you’re becoming someone else’s proxy war, who wants you to win?) and also it allows for flexibility and for nations to change sides – like Poland switching from 5.45 to 5.56.
they are technical terms, but are also presented using the words global, and north, the latter of which applies about as effectively to Australia and New Zealand as the former applies to a banana, and so could have been made a lot more actually useful in communication (i.e. what language is for) by just saying a different word. I mean saying ‘the global thingumies’ would be more accurate as it will at least not mean the exact opposite of what you intended depending on whether the reader is basically party to an in-joke (academic definitions aren’t there for clarity when they actively prevent non-academics understanding the concepts via pretty deliberate obfuscation).
I have the impression the terms are basically euphemisms for ‘Developed Countries’ and ‘Developing Countries’, which had themselves originated as euphemisms for ‘rich and economically advanced countries*’ and ‘poor not economically advanced countries’.
With even the wikipedia article on ‘Global North and Global South’ admitting this:
* Note, countries which are rich, but only so because they happen to have lots of valuable resources like Saudi-Arabia seem to generally not be regarded as ‘Developed Countries’.
The Russians themselves seem divided on this issue, with Putin using anti-Western rhetoric to shore up his domestic support. But the argument goes back further than that–after all, so much of Russian history was impacted by the Mongol invasion. They seem ambivalent regarding whether they want to look East or look West for their cultural inspirations.
Similar with Hungary. Oft quoted, already in 1905 a poet (Endre Ady) described it as “Ferry Country” (“Komp-ország”) for its tendency to shuttle back and forth between East and West. In particular, he created this metaphor in the context of lamenting that at the time, it was choosing once again to align its self-image Eastward.
Well, in the 2020s the current government (Viktor Orbán & Fidesz, in power since 2010) is opposed to liberalism, which they opt to describe as “Western” (and “decadent”, of course) and instead publicly have a policy for “opening to the East”. This includes everything from harmless silly things (e.g. sending a delegation to the international cultural event for steppe nomad Turkic peoples) through participating in the Belt and Road program, to — despite being a member of both NATO and the EU — voting Russia’s interest in the UN.
@BasilMarte,
While your point is well taken, I’d also point out that it’s much more general than just “Hungary”, to some extent it applies to other Eastern/Central European countries too. This pair of surveys, from the same organization in 2017 and 2020 respectively, is particularly interesting, since it asks a variety of questions, some of which are more specifically about geopolitics but others of which touch on broader civilizational and historical orientation. In most of the countries surveyed, a plurality of people don’t see themselves as part of “the west”, but rather as part of a distinct zone of their own, somewhere in between “the West” and “Russia”. The most relevant charts are on page 11 of each.
Though to be fair, if they had to choose, most people in all of these countries would align with “the west” rather than Russia: to me, though, the most interesting thing is that the biggest share of people would choose to align with neither.
https://www.globsec.org/sites/default/files/2021-04/Image-of-Russia-Mighty-Slavic-Brother-or-Hungry-Bear-Nextdoor.pdf
https://www.globsec.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/globsec_trends_2017.pdf
It is worth pointing out that the balance has tipped against Russia since they invaded Ukraine three years ago (just like dissatisfaction with the “western” model was especially high in, say, 2010 when the Great Recession was going on). Maybe that’s an indication of a deeper and more long-lasting change in orientation, but maybe not.
Personally, I would have a pretty narrow definition of “the west”, which would certainly not include Eastern or East-Central Europe, and probably not Latin America either, but I guess nobody is asking me (and since even in this common thread there’s quite a bit of disagreement, I feel that my opinion on the question is as good as anyone else’s). I should also make it clear that I’m not treating “Western” as a term of praise here, quite the contrary. I don’t usually use the term “western civilization” myself- partly because i think nations and ethnic groups are the more natural focus of loyalty than “civilizations”, partly because there is so much disagreement on what “the west” really is. When I use the term “western” it’s usually in a critical tone, comparing American society (and cultures somewhat similar to it, e.g. England, France, etc.) unfavorably to other past or present cultural groups.
@Basil Marte,
I’m not sure why this didn’t go through, so I’ll try again. (Possibly because I tried including two links, to two different surveys).
Your point about Hungary is well taken, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Ambivalence about “the west” is very much not limited to Hungary, it appears to be shared to some extent by many people in Eastern and Eastern-Central Europe more generally. This survey from 2017 (and a companion one from 2020, which I’m not going to link) is pretty interesting, especially the chart on page 11. It indicates that both in Hungary and in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the plurality of people don’t identify either with “the West” or “Russia”, but rather see themselves as sort of a distinct zone, separate from both. (Although if pressed, “the West” is still more popular than Russia).
https://www.globsec.org/sites/default/files/2017-09/globsec_trends_2017.pdf
No one is particularly asking me, but since there seems to be quite a bit of disagreement in this thread about exactly what counts as “the west”, I think I’m as entitled to an opinion as anyone else. I definitely wouldn’t consider Eastern or Eastern/Central Europe to be part of “the west”, nor Latin America either (sister civilizations, sure, but still distinct). That’s mostly because I’d put less weight on Christianity and ancient Greece and Rome, in shaping what a society like America is today, than some people do, and I’d place more evidence on the historical trajectory of the last couple of centuries and especially on the last century, weighting things more heavily the closer they get to the present. The history of the last few centuries, and the lessons people learn from it and how that shapes the way they view the world, is going to look very different in Hungary or Slovakia, or for that matter in Peru or Bolivia, than it does in England and America. (i can go into more detail, and might when i have some more time this evening).
Two societies might draw on common origins (Christianity, Platonism, whatever else), but if they continue on different historical paths for long enough, I’d say that they’ve diverged to the point where their differences outweigh their similarities. Similarly, I’d question whether it’s really useful to take all the groups that have historically called themselves Christian, or drawn on the Christian tradition, and to say that they’re really all different branches of one religion. Beyond a point I’d say they’ve diverged enough that they’re different religions, and that if you call one of them Christian (I don’t really care which) then you really shouldn’t use the same term for the others.
That having been said, though, I don’t use the whole concept of “western civilization” or “the west” all that much, and certainly I don’t set any favorable normative value on them: when I talk about “the west” at all, it’s usually to contrast it unfavorably with other cultural zones, past or present.
So, WEIRD, or as formerly known, the Hajnal line?
Random bit about page 21 (MPs vs. referenda) of the survey you linked: the Fidesz government has repeatedly run “national consultations”, which I would describe as social science antiresearch. They compile 20-40 issues, write laughably leading A&B answers for each, mail a copy to every adult, collect the low percentage that are filled out and mailed back, sort descending by favored answer percentage, then blast it on news, billboards, etc. that “95% of people want [policy that the government wants]”. This process has zero legally binding power, it’s just a tool for the government to say “oh this is not our choice, this policy is what the people want”.
Nor is Russia’s defining itself by opposition to “the West” solely a post-Communist phenomenon. Read Sartre’s statement declining the Nobel Prize, in which he defined himself as a man of “the East” in opposition to the West.
(For those too young or too insular to remember it, or too disingenuous to acknowledge it, Sartre declined the Nobel Prize because the Nobel Committee had previously honored Pasternak, whose work “Dr. Zhivago” was perceived as criticizing Communism, and the Party was upset and hoping to delegitimize the Prize. Sartre was a devoted servant of the Party and hoped to bolster, not “otherize,” Communism.)
@ey81,
I assume by ‘disingenuous’ you’re intending to mean Sartre fans who are trying to make him look ‘better’. Which seems silly to me (on their part, not yours). Declining a Nobel Prize, especially for ideological reasons, is a quite public statement (one also made by Le Duc Tho 9 years later) and I would assume that Sartre would *want* to be remembered for that, as much as for anything else.
No, no, the “disingenuous” people I refer to are those who claim that referring to Russia or the Soviet Union as “the East” in contradistinction to “the West” is an attempt to “otherize” and demonize it, when in fact Soviet partisans were often happy to adopt that trope.
@ey81,
Oh, got it ok.
Yes, I’d consider that- well, maybe I wouldn’t say “disingenuous”, but clearly false. If someone is strongly criticizing “the west” from the point of view of an outsider (maybe on ideological grounds, e.g. on communist or socialist or nationalist or religious-traditional or anticolonial grounds, or maybe more on ethnic or cultural or religious terms of identity), and if they make it clear that they think their nation or culture is different from and at least in some ways superior to “the west”, as many people do, then I think it would be specious to call *them* part of “the west”. Whether you think their group as a whole is part of “the west” is going to depend on how many people like them, versus how many people who are enthralled with and want to copy countries like America or England, and which side gets the upper hand.
I agree with Bret (and you, I think?) that there is no valid concept that groups ancient Hellas and Rome with the modern EU and North America, but excludes Russia, Turkey, the Maghreb, among others. Bret’s concept of “successor societies to Egypt and Mesopotamia” seems valid to me, but will be too broad for many purposes, since there are of course differences among those societies.
I do think there is a valid concept of “those countries that use the Latin alphabet because they used Latin for most written communication in the past, recognized the Pope at some point, went through Gothic, then Renaissance, then Baroque architecture, through polyphony, then chord progression in music – and their overseas offspring” (Latin American countries being in some cases hard to include or exclude).
It’s just that this group cannot claim a more direct relationship to ancient Hellas than Russia or Turkey can.
“I agree with Bret (and you, I think?) that there is no valid concept that groups ancient Hellas and Rome with the modern EU and North America, but excludes Russia, Turkey, the Maghreb, among others. ”
I have my doubts that most inhabitants of the Maghreb would agree they should be included in that group. Ultimately, you are a member of an identity group if people think you are. An identity group is a social fact, not an objective one.
Also, what does the word “valid” mean here? “Useful”? “Allowed”? Allowed by whom?
I thought of “valid” in a statistical sense (as in “construct validity”), though I don’t think a statistical test could actually be performed on such a question! Read “useful” if you want.
Few inhabitants of Western Europe or North America will subscribe to a group identity of “cultural descendants of Egypt or Mesopotamia” either. Bret’s concept seems to me to be of use as a tool for historians, not a self-ascribed identity. Note that I propose a different construct which is nearer to a self-ascribed “Western” identity, but **excludes** ancient Rome and Hellas.
The Islamic world absolutely is part of the group of civilizations that’s been heavily influenced by Greece and Rome. Alexander the Great is even in the Quran! And a lot of the edifice of Islamic thought draws heavily on Greek philosophy (you could debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s certainly a thing).
I don’t think that makes them “western”, but then, I don’t define “western” in terms of being influenced by Greece and Rome. Two different societies can both be influenced by Greek thought but take that in very different directions.
I tend to agree. As a Finn, I really have some difficult embracing Russia as “Western”. The Russian heritage is a complex interplay of Zapadnik and Slavophile thought (going by different names throughout centuries), but the westernisers have never held the upper hand for long. The most lasting contributions of Russian westernisers are the custom of using forefinger and middle finger for the sign of cross and adopting Western fashion. Otherwise, the Russian culture is very much the heir of Eastern Rome. The West, as I understand it, is where the Western Church has had its historical influence: you need to have Augustine and Aquinas in your intellectual tradition, as well as Locke and Voltaire.
It is completely true that this sphere doesn’t have an exclusive claim to the heritage of Ancient Rome and Greece but shares it with Russia and Islamic world. None of these can claim exclusive ownership of this heritage, and naturally, there is a continuous interaction between these three, but in any case, the differences are so clear that I would not really try to claim that they don’t exist.
Japan is, in my opinion, sui generis: economically and militarily part of the “status quo coalition”, but it has so unique culture that it is not really part of the West – and the Japanese know this quite well, making extremely conscious demarcation between the “Japanese” and “Western” aspects of their culture.
What is actually interesting is the question of Latin America: do we perhaps have a fourth heir of Rome and Greece there?
How much does it matter that Russia looks up to Byzantium and not (the original) Rome? It’s not the only Orthodox state in and around Europe; Bulgaria and Romania are Orthodox and at this point aren’t that different from the Catholic states of Western Europe, just somewhat poorer. Ukraine is mixed between Catholic and Orthodox, and contra Huntington’s thesis, this distinction has been irrelevant since Euromaidan.
“Ukraine is mixed between Catholic and Orthodox, and contra Huntington’s thesis, this distinction has been irrelevant since Euromaidan.”
True, but Orthodox is by far the larger denomination – Ukraine is 72% Orthodox and 9% Catholic.
My own take here is that the Russian interest for the war of aggression in Ukraine can best be understood as a war to destroy an ideological enemy. The Russian government is extremely Slavophilic, embracing the idea of Russia as the “other” of the West. Ukrainian government, and very obviously, its people, too, want integration with the West, a classically Zapadnik approach.
Kyiv is the heart of the Old Rus, from which Moscovy historically drawn its legitimacy. For the current Russian ideology, an eventual successful of Ukraine to integrate in the West would mean that their ideology about Russia as inherently foreign would be proven wrong.
I do think there is a valid concept of “those countries that use the Latin alphabet because they used Latin for most written communication in the past, recognized the Pope at some point, went through Gothic, then Renaissance, then Baroque architecture, through polyphony, then chord progression in music – and their overseas offspring” (Latin American countries being in some cases hard to include or exclude).
I’d agree with a lot of that, but I’d also add the shared experience of extending imperial/colonial control over the “non-western” world, and dealing with the consequences of that, as a key formative experience for America and Western Europe that helped shape what those societies are like today. (At least, from my perspective). That obviously was *not* something that Latin America or Eastern/Central Europe participated in (Russia did, but I’d exclude them for other reasons), and is a big part of why when I talk about “the west”, I’m always careful to exclude them.
I get your point, but Switzerland, Norway and Iceland have no colonizing past, and Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Greece, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have very little of it. Poles and Irish only participated in overseas colonization as individuals within the empires that had conquered them. Even Germany’s colonizing past was short and of comparatively small scale. So your point would have to be hedged a bit to include a lot of indirect influences.
Switzerland, Norway and Iceland have no colonizing past
You’d never catch someone from Norway sailing across the sea to another country, conquering it, plundering it, enslaving the locals, settling there, imposing foreign laws and customs, and turning it into part of their empire. Not their thing at all.
(distant monastic screams from Lindisfarne)
Yeah, ignore that, happens all the time, don’t know why.
@Aldarion,
Correct, but I wouldn’t consider Poland, or Czechia & Slovakia, or Croatia, to be “Western”, and their very different historical experience during the 19th and 20th c is a big part of why. I’m not sure where I’d draw the line exactly (not sure how I think of Finland, for example, or the eastern parts of Germany), but Slovakia is definitely on the other side. In my opinion.
Switzerland on the other hand, I would definitely consider “western”. It was where Calvinism got started, after all, and Calvinism has been such a strong influence on American history (and of course on other core “western” societies like Scotland and the Netherlands) that it would be impossible for me to think of it otherwise. Same for Ireland. So yes, it’s clear to me that there were individual western countries which didn’t participate in the colonial feeding frenzy, or (like Denmark) only to a small degree. But, I still think of them as nested within a broader Western “ecosystem”- they interacted and were tied together with the other great powers who did.
This in reply to ajay about Norway:
I was specifically qualifying Hector’s definition of the “West” as those who exercised “imperial/colonial control over the “non-western” world”. I am not sure I agree with Hector, but at least his definition has some grip. Invading or conquering one’s neighbours is the most general trait in the world since at least the rise of agriculture, so it’s not surprising that the ancestors of modern Norwegian, before a Norwegian state even existed, did the same thing as everybody else.
“Poles and Irish only participated in overseas colonization as individuals within the empires that had conquered them.”
I suspect this is presentism – a lot of people in the past who would now qualify as Irish participated energetically in colonisation and many of them identified themselves as British while doing it.
Like the Duke of Wellington! If you’d told him that he was a citizen of a conquered country he’d have laughed in your face.
“England conquered Ireland” is the consensus opinion now but it wasn’t how it was universally seen at the time, and certainly it’s not the only way of describing a series of events that led to a bunch of French-speaking Norsemen running a country previously run by a bunch of Gaelic-speaking Norsemen.
In fairness to people who denounce the Russian invasion of Ukraine as ‘barbaric’ in contrast to ‘civilized’ conduct, despite the fact that large scale warfare is a product of materially developed states that are often called ‘civilizations…’
One of the core concepts that we fold into “civilized” is the political and philosophical concept of “fit to live in the city.” That is to say, the condition of “being the kind of people you’d want living within a community alongside yourself.” People who will not damage the community through brutality or vandalism or senseless hostility and violence towards other members of the community.
The Russian army has revealed itself as the kind of people who make very bad neighbors.
Interestingly enough, this logic would lead to the conclusion that the most civilized nations are actually the least civilized, and vice versa, most of the time in any case. Especially historically speaking.
Which would be a conclusion I could wholeheartedly agree with if it weren’t applied so bloody selectively.
Small scale societies are less likely to invade large scale societies than vice versa, but that doesn’t mean the people in them are less violent.
Oh, absolutely. Still, the end result matters somewhat too 🙂
Oh, absolutely. Still, the end result matters somewhat too
yes, ‘moral luck’ is a big part of how we actually live our lives, even if you can argue it shouldn’t be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_luck
Yes, we have plenty of examples of small scale societies invading even smaller scale societies.
From the Maori genociding the Moriori to the Haudenosaunee expansion during the Beaver Wars (which, IIRC also include what that some historians have classified as genocides).
Though, a complicating factor for comparisons between the groups of ‘small scale societies’ and ‘large scale societies’ is that the variation in the tendency to commit extreme cruel violence within those groups appears to me even larger than the variation between them.
A quip commonly attributed to Gandhi (but not well evidenced, and likely apocryphal, according to quoteinvestigator and wikiquote) uses this logic to present it’s humor:
Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/
Yes, I suppose ‘civilization’ is another of those confusing words which have multiple meanings wholly orthogonal to each other; like ‘honour’*, I suppose.
I myself dislike using such words, believing that they can lead to unclarity; but sometimes no more exact alternative is available.
It reminds me of an anecdote I had once read (no idea whether it is true) of an Egyptian dictator replying to complaints about his ‘uncivilized’ treatment of political dissidents with ‘Egypt is the oldest civilization in the world’.
Though, as civilization seems to at least sometimes be used as an opposite of ‘wilderness’, ‘uncultured’, ‘(technological?) primitivity’, and ‘cruelty/amorality’; I suppose one could use even more orthogonal meanings in the same paragraph.
* I have the impression the word ‘honour’ has been used to mean things ranging from ‘being honest and keeping ones word’ to ‘inflicting patriarchal oppression on female relatives for the sake of social status’.
It reminds me of an anecdote I had once read (no idea whether it is true) of an Egyptian dictator replying to complaints about his ‘uncivilized’ treatment of political dissidents with ‘Egypt is the oldest civilization in the world’.
So I can’t say for sure (since you didn’t specify who the leader in question was, and even then I wouldn’t be able to get into his thoughts). But, I would assume that what’s going on there was that the leader in question was deliberately conflating two different senses of ‘civilized’. Not to be deceptive or disingenuous, but to make a couple of serious points, which Americans would (in my opinion) do well to seriously consider. I would assume that what he was getting at was something like the following:
“Most societies, including most highly advanced civilizations historically, haven’t subscribed to liberal values, and by the lights of a society like America would seem extremely authoritarian. This should, first of all, lead you to have more epistemic humility about your own liberal values, and make you question whether you’re normatively correct about what’s good and right: how likely is it that you are right and that all these other societies, including highly advanced and long lasting ones, are wrong? It should also lead you to question whether liberal values can sustain a civilization in the long run: after all, Egypt and societies like it have a much longer track record than either American civilization, or the liberal order in England and a few other western European societies which gave rise to it. And finally, it should lead you to question whether liberal values are actually a realistic basis for running a society: maybe the people who have been running Egyptian society for several millennia know some things you don’t?”
“Africa” is doing a lot of work there.
Most people now use the word to mean the continent, but pretty much everything south of the Sahara was unknown to Europe during the time when “the West” as a term was first used.
And “Europe” is what “the West” generally means for those who use the term – that, plus the English and French parts of the New World.
Russia has always been a tough case for “Europe or Asia?” This isn’t just recent, it goes back well beyond Napoleon’s time at least.
Islam becomes “not the West” because of its philosophy. Which may be a reason for Orthodox Christianity also not considered being “West” either, because of Caesaropapism.
England and Anglicism likely escape that label partly because the king tended not to decree religious stuff much after Henry VIII, and partly because the writers are mostly English.
“The West” is a fairly modern term that definitely post-dates the discovery of the Americas, Sub-saharan Africa, and the naval routes between Europe and India.
It Is largely a term steeped in 19th century era nationalism, but referring to the old borders of medieval Catholic Christianity (plus all the conquests of the colonial powers that resulted in White and mixed race settler states, but only including those where the nonwhite population had been largely genocided off the map).
Is Mexico part of “the West”?
I don’t consider it such. You may do so. This is likely the key question on whether it’s just “Christendom” or not.
… I mean, if you define “The West” is “something without Mexico in it”, then by definition Mexico isn’t part of “The West”.
But in everyday parlance, people don’t bother defining “The West”, they just have some vague notion of what it means. Based on how people use the term, yes, Mexico is clearly part of “The West” unless the term is explicitly defined as not including Mexico.
By Morris’ definition, of course Mexico is a Western country, and it’s absurd to argue that it isn’t.
@InfraPink,
Setting aside Mexico, is Bolivia part of “the west”? The government for the last 20 years (they lost an election this summer so are now out of power) was very much indigenous-nationalist as well as socialist, and made a conscious effort to break away from some of the cultural traits inherited from colonial rule (giving indigenous languages co-official status, for example). I think if you asked one of their loyalists they might well say they see themselves not as a transplanted Spanish settler state but as a fusion of Spanish culture with something else which is definitely not “Western”.
(This is a reply to Hector; the Reply button isn’t showing up under his post)
> Setting aside Mexico, is Bolivia part of “the west”? The government for the last 20 years (they lost an election this summer so are now out of power) was very much indigenous-nationalist as well as socialist, and made a conscious effort to break away from some of the cultural traits inherited from colonial rule (giving indigenous languages co-official status, for example). I think if you asked one of their loyalists they might well say they see themselves not as a transplanted Spanish settler state but as a fusion of Spanish culture with something else which is definitely not “Western”.
Bold of you to assume that the indigenous peoples of the Americas aren’t “Western”.
But OK, we live on a globe, so let’s operate under the assumption that they aren’t. I would still include Bolivia as part of “The West”. For one thing, it’s west of Europe and Africa, among a bunch of other “Western” countries. I strongly approve of Movimiento al Socialismo’s efforts to support originario rights and culture, but the fact remains that Bolivia was ruled directly by Spain for 300 years, and even after independence, the country was dominated by Hispanic people whose Spanish-derived culture actively suppressed the various indigenous cultures.
From what I read on Wikipedia, Bolivia definitely seems to be better about indigenous rights than other American countries, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t part of “The West”.
but the fact remains that Bolivia was ruled directly by Spain for 300 years, and even after independence, the country was dominated by Hispanic people whose Spanish-derived culture actively suppressed the various indigenous cultures.
@InfraPink,
I agree with that, but I guess I would say that I think these cultural, geopolitical and civilizational alignments aren’t set in stone, and that people (individually or collectively) can make a conscious choice to move towards a particular identity or away from it. I’d say that someone in America who rejects Christianity and embraces, I dunno, Hinduism or Slavic paganism, or native American religion or something, is making a conscious effort to “de-westernize” themselves. Same if they become a Communist, or otherwise choose to diverge sharply from the mainstream values of American society. And what’s true of individuals can also be true of societies.
Now that the MAS is out of power we’ll see how lasting those changes will prove to be, but I brought them up because that’s the clearest example that came to mind of a Western Hemisphere society, in recent years, trying to consciously re-imagine themselves as something more than a Western European settler state.
” the king tended not to decree religious stuff much after Henry VIII”
Mary Tudor? Elizabeth? James II? The debates over Cathloic Emancipation in the 18th and early 19th centuries?
Religion was a contentious and highly political matter in Britain until the very late 19th century.
Also, Caesaropapism was alive and well in Catholic thought and practice until the 14th century or perhaps later (recall that the French crown played a very active part in theological debates up to Louis XIV, and maintained its firm claim to a say in clerical appointments).
I would draw attention to the recent book “The West” by Georgios Varouxakis which attempts to trace the history of the term and associated concept as it applies to geopolitics. The conclusion is that when the term first started being used in a recognisable sense – interestingly, in France, rather than an Anglophone country – it was in the 1840s, and was oppositional *to Russia*.
The political context was a growth of Russian power and influence in Europe during the Concert period corresponding with the decline of the traditional eastern European powers (the Ottomans and Habsburgs), that France (and Britain) found threatening, and would eventually erupt in the Crimean War in the 1850s.
Until that point the generally equivalent term was Christendom, but since that included Russia, a new term was required that incorporated the same ideas and expressed a shared set of values but which specifically excluded Russia.
On that basis, and if Varouxakis is correct, Russia was never part of “the West”.
Huh, interesting. I’ll have to check that book out.
“today, we constantly hear about conflicts between Russia and “The West”, even though Russia is as Western as they come”
Russia’s current government explicitly groups together its enemies and calls them “the West”! How much less Western can you get?
Is there any way to read this that doesn’t boil down to “The West is white people”??
People have been using “The West” to otherise Slavic countries, especially Russia, since at least the Cold War, though as Tom points out, this seems to have started in France in the 1840s (but by the 1840s French definition, Germany wouldn’t be part of “The West” either). The implication has always been that “The West” is good, just, logical, rational, temperate, and progressive, unlike those losers in Türkiye/Russia/wherever.
When almost everybody reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with “Oh FUCK no!”, Putin decided to embrace this othering and set himself, and by extension Russia, is a brave stalwart against evil foreign interference. Russia’s enemies call themselves “The West” and exclude Russia from the club; Putin embraces that at the same time he allies with India (not “The West”), China (not “The West”), the bad part of Korea (not “The West”), and Iran (which I would say is part of “The West”, but most people don’t).
If “The West” has something to do with Rome, then Russia has a long history of being “Western”. So many Russian names are derived from Latin. Russia’s kings called themselves caesars right up to the end. After the Roman Empire was finally crushed by Ottoman Türkiye, Zosimus the Bearded stated, in writing, that Ivan III was the caesar of the Third Rome (the second Rome being Constantinople/Istanbul, and the first Rome being the actual Rome), and compared him to Constantine. Until the Crimean War, the tsar of Russia was the official protector of Christians in Türkiye.
So yes, despite the Romance- and Germanic-speaking peoples’ exclusion of Russia from “The West”, and Putin’s embracing that for public image, Russia is most definitely a western country.
I mentioned above that I also consider Iran to be a Western country. For the record, so are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and Ghana, among others.
Apparently the One True Definition of “the West” includes a lot of countries in which almost no one considers themselves to be part of “the West”.
You seem to be asserting that the phrase means what you want it to mean, and that every other person who uses it is wrong. Language usually requires that people use words in similar ways to each other. You are not doing that.
“When almost everybody reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with “Oh FUCK no!”, Putin decided to embrace this othering and set himself, and by extension Russia, is a brave stalwart against evil foreign interference. Russia’s enemies call themselves “The West” and exclude Russia from the club; Putin embraces that”
If you’re suggesting that Russian leaders only started defining Russia as “not the West” in 2022, you are wrong.
Here’s Stalin in 1927:
“There will be no war this year because our enemies are not ready to go to war, because they more than anyone else fear the outcome of a war, because the workers of the West do not want to fight the U.S.S.R.”
Here’s Lenin in 1918:
“During this past year the working class has not been engaged in idle philosophising, but in the practical work of creating and exercising a proletarian dictatorship, despite the excited mental state of the intellectuals. Capitalism still rules the roost in the West. But now the day of great upheavals is dawning there too.”
I appreciate that your main argument is that you think Russia should be counted as part of “the West” and you’re welcome to believe that. But “Russia is not part of the West” has been a common belief among Russian leaders for centuries.
“Until the Crimean War, the tsar of Russia was the official protector of Christians in Türkiye.”
Also, this is wrong on two counts. First, it’s anachronistic: there was of course no such country as Turkey in 1853, and in fact Tsar Nicholas got into the war because he was trying to assert his status as protector of Christians in Palestine, which isn’t in modern Turkey. You mean the Ottoman Empire.
Second, Russia’s status as protector of Christians in the Ottoman Empire was far from official, far from settled, and inasmuch as it existed at any point applied (understandably) only to Eastern Orthodox Christians – not, for example, to Catholics. “Protector of Christians” status was certainly something that successive Tsars were very keen to assert for themselves, but that doesn’t mean it existed.
The West rarely if ever thought of Russia as Western, and Russia NEVER thought of itself as Western. But sure, Western as they come.
It is interesting what you write of, of the clash of different understandings from different academic fields. I sometimes think of the frustration of economists on seeing historians reject the use of counterfactuals, often at the same time using something that looks very much like a counterfactual.
That varies a lot: Donald Kagan claimed that the use of counterfactuals was what distinguished the historian from the mere annalist. He also argued that those historians who claim to eschew counterfactuals merely disguise them: a sentence like “Brasidas won the battle because . . . .” is equivalent to “If Brasidas had done something different, he would have lost the battle.”
The description of causality is a perennial source of confusion in all sorts of fields (never mind between them). There are several characteristic issues:
– Relative importance of causes in a multicausal event/outcome. For instance, accident investigation culture makes a distinction between “probable cause” and “contributing cause”, but has some tendency to in turn treat each as an internally homogeneous bucket.
– Overdetermined outcomes.
– Chained causes. This one includes the phrasing which I find the most annoying. When someone tries to emphasize an upstream cause over the intervening steps, often they say some variant of “it wasn’t [proximate cause] that lead to [outcome], but [distal cause]”, which is false on a literal reading.
– Disagreement on whether an attempted but-for test’s scenario is incoherent. If, say, one party considers a proximate cause to be 100% entailed by a distal cause (which also has a “direct” effect on the event, or at least via another intermediary pathway) and the other asks what would happen if {yes distal cause, no proximate cause}, because they don’t see anything wrong there.
– Different personal or cultural/institutional assumptions on what (if any) implications the things said here and now would carry to the future. Obvious cases: fault/praise, interventions to address. Not so obvious cases: my understanding is that there is an ongoing debate about whether members of the (by an old-fashioned name) lumpenproletariat understand counterfactuals. One side holds up a mountain of evidence that they are unwilling/-able to entertain them. The other side points out that they are perfectly willing to talk about whether sportsball player #1 or #2 would conquer, and furthermore goes on to say that, uh, er, interpersonal norms among these people rely on credibility and deterrence, which would be gravely undermined by being observed to consider some of the premises of the counterfactuals usually presented. Or that they have a (perfectly justified) learned distrust of questions whose point is not immediately obvious, because in their experience those oft harbor legal traps.
That sounds fascinating. Do you have a source I could read?
I think the main point that can be addressed is, how different were Rome in strategy compared to Gaul, Carthage, Persia? Are they said to be equally not using strategy? Using strategy? Rome is more capable in using strategy than Gaul? I think a comprehensible answer would need to include this comparison, which you have touched by comparing it to 1400-1700 societies.
About that civil right activists, sounds interesting. But does he touch the actual violent part at all? I’ve heard that one of the main reason why non-violents win, is when they actually have violent wing. The big stick to the speak softly. There are tons of riots in both civil right movements and indian independence, and so I’ve heard that non-violent narratives have got a ton of pushbacks.
“There are tons of riots in both civil right movements and indian independence, and so I’ve heard that non-violent narratives have got a ton of pushbacks.”
There were, but at least within the American civil rights movement, it’s worth noting that its legislative successes mostly occurred during the “nonviolent” phase of the movement. The threat of violence was always present–Malcolm X, for example, made a speech saying that it would either be the ballot or the bullet in 1964–and from my understanding there were a few times, mostly in the backcountry, where white supremacists and civil rights activists actually did come to blows.
However, what’s worth noting is that as the movement became less nonviolent in the late sixties, symbolized by things like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee changing its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee, support for the movement (and progressivism in general) declined, culminating in the 1972 election when Nixon won with 61% of the popular vote, defeating the progressive George McGovern.
Hmm could it be that the decline of support cause the decline of violence? Like, they lost their backing support so they can’t get away with more things so they stopped.
Errr…no. I recommend you read Days of Rage.
Behind the civil rights movement was the threat of communism, backed by the military might of the Soviet Union. This was explicit in the thinking of many who supported the cause as well as those opposed The thought was, roughly, ‘Jim Crow undermines our claims abroad, weakening our position vis-a-vis the communist powers and enabling subversive movements to take hold domestically – with foreign support’)
In general, I have noticed that violence typically works best for the people with the greatest capacity to inflict violence on their opponents. These tend to be people with police forces and armies on their side, or at least greatly superior numbers at the important point.
As I understand matters the Civil Rights campaigners did not have control of the American police, National Guard or Army, and if they had greatly superior numbers, it is not obvious why they would need violence.
I sometimes think American politics would go a lot more smoothly if people remembered that violence is almost always on the side of the oppressor. That is why the oppressor is able to get on with the oppressing in the first place.
Revolutions are made by the powerful, not the weak. Politics is mostly a matter of getting the power on your side, rather than that of the other guy. If you have obviously succeeded in this matter, you don’t usually have to fight.
It is true that revolutions are made by the powerful, not the weak.
The trick is that there is a form of power available to the unwashed masses that only exists when they are willing, if necessary, to charge a machine gun nest armed with whatever martially useful equipment the customs of their nation and time permit to civilians.
The armies, police, and so forth of a national government are usually quite capable of crushing resistance. But this capability can start to break down when there are, say, only 100,000 soldiers and secret policemen left that are loyal to the regime and five million citizens of the country who are willing to accept a 2% risk of death to end the regime.
Thus, revolutions are “made by the powerful” in that they tend to begin after the existing powerful have committed very grave errors, such that they not only lose popular support, but create an equally powerful and intensely opposed revolutionary force that seeks their removal.
Naturally, when you encounter a society whose elites are in the early stages of making errors that are not yet grave enough to spark a revolution, you will find a fringe of premature revolutionaries. These particularly contentious, feisty, uppity anti-regime people are personally already sparked, while the majority of the population is not. Because they are, as it were, more ‘flammable’ than the rest of the population.
Thomas Paine was speaking against King George III years before it was popular to do so among the entire elite of the Thirteen Colonies. Vladimir Lenin was speaking out against the Czar long before the general populace of Russia grew so tired of him that his abdication was a necessary prerequisite for the Russian government to go on in any form. Because they were uppity and contentious like that, whatever other things they did not have in common.
“Thomas Paine was speaking against King George III years before it was popular to do so among the entire elite of the Thirteen Colonies.”
But he didn’t fire a shot by speaking, did he? So violence wasn’t needed. And if some of it had been directed against members of that elite, it would almost certainly have been harmful to his cause.
The actual violence was employed later by the colonial militias, which comprised most of the military manpower in North America. Thomas Paine was not employing force when his cause was weak. Just when it was strong. That is when you should employ force. When you have the advantage.
Returning to the Civil Rights campaign, if it had been true that the vast majority of Americans were so dedicated to the cause of racial equality, there would have been no need for a Civil Rights campaign in the first place. There was a need only because the median voter was not that bothered.
OTOH, violence was unlikely to work in the areas where it mattered because in those places it was the segregationists that controlled most of the available force.
So the campaigners had to do something for their cause to triumph, and it had to be something other than violence. Do not start a fight unless you will win.
You’ll find that most of the famous revolutions succeeded because the armies that would have otherwise opposed them either sat out the conflict or switched sides outright.
It is notable that, for example, in spite of all leftist rhetoric concerning spontaneous uprisings of the masses and the heroic storming of bayonets, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 had no real military opponent in Petrograd and only started to run into military scale opposition *after* the Bolsheviks had already seized power in the capital.
Naturally. If the other fellow has an army and you don’t, you are far better off trying to talk his army into swapping sides than fighting it.
I think this is an underrated point, and largely true. Though I would qualify it a bit- revolutions can also succeed when the army splits and is divided (and then has to fight a civil war among itself), or when the revolutionaries have the support of a foreign invading army (e.g. Napoleon’s army in the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, the Soviet army after WWII, the American army in Afghanistan in 2001, etc.).
Well, yes. But by late 1917 almost all the army had switched sides to socialist parties of various stripes. The Bolshevik coup was against the Kerensky government, not the Tsarist one.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the internal sources on decisionmaking for those polities (or the archaeological Big Data that has let us see imperial Roman policy in action since the 19th century). There are no long surviving writings on policy by someone who was close to Artaxerxes II or the sufetes of Carthage like Sallust and Cicero and Tacitus and Seneca were close to Roman consuls and emperors. We do have indigenous texts on policy from the Neo-Assyrians.
Wow, all these years I have been feeling so clever/privileged because I have double free access to JSTOR as a Yale alum and a current Columbia student, and now I learn that anyone can have it. (I assuredly have never downloaded 100 articles in a year, much less a month.) It’s like learning that people with MasterCards get into the same airport lounge as your Amex card.
> Instead, Mattern notes that Roman leaders were not trained in military science but in philosophy, rhetoric, even poetry and the Roman empire simply lacked the institutions – war colleges, general staffs, foreign offices, planning bureaus and such – to plan strategically and to coordinate those plans over large geographic areas.
Okay, maybe the actual arguement is a little undersold here, but I can’t help but think the good Doctor can count herself lucky that she is a classicist. Someone with an engineering degree trying to argue that studying philosophy and rhetoric, makes one incapabale of strategic thinking, would be skwered, flayed, and burned alive by our host.
More seriously, I really feel like I am missing the point here. Why does one need those institutions to have a strategy?
I see could, how one could argue, that the Roman republic with their one year offices could not enact real long time strategies. But even that would leave the question how the republic was able to plan, prepare and execute multi-year campaings of conquest, if it weren’t able to build a strategy.
Yeah, as our host alluded to, it raises the question of when the primitivists think “strategy” did become possible. Was Gustavus Adolphus capable of strategy? Frederick the Great? If you take the arguments literally enough you’re going to end up concluding “strategy” was not practiced until partway through the First World War.
Considering how the first half of WW1 went, I have some sympathy for that view :p
What is it about Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or Ukraine that leads you to conclude that thought processes have improved since 1914?
This may be an artefact of common Anglo-Saxon heritage. Neither United States nor Great Britain had really effective coordinated military high command before the 20th century, and the bureaucratic battles that brought about the Defence Establishment, later known as Department of Defence, were fresh in the minds of people writing in 1970’s – and will to allow that even older forms of organization could allow for execution of grand strategy was nonexistent. At the same time, United States was living in the aftermath of New Deal and its legacy of social engineering, modifying society consciously using sociological research as a tool.
Accepting Luttwak’s thesis that even ancient states were capable of strategy would mean that people who had been on the losing side of those bureaucratic and political struggles might have not been fully wrong. So, seen from the distance, Luttwak can be seen as essentially questioning the need for whole modern administrative state, an extremely radically reactionary position.
I suspect the idea would be that (the) strategy was culturally embedded. At
charactercity-state generation, you rolled a random strategy, fixed for the game. Some would be fairly chill. Others would have a tradition that, whenever they found themselves not at war with anyone, the consul sacrifices a pig to Mars and reads off its liver who to go to war with. (Maybe not literally. Just prize victory so highly that statesmen deliberately seek opportunities to fight.) Then as history ticked forward, and they all started conquering each other, those with bad strategies …stopped being available for sampling. Whereas those with good strategies predictably suffered some disasters (from running fleets into storms to running armies into deserts outside Carrhae), but their previous aggression gave them the material superiority to survive the occasional faceplant.This is kind of an exaggeration, but maybe not necessarily by much? To jump outside the Med: apparently a cultural belief that you need to constantly fight wars, to create a constant stream of captives to sacrifice, or else the Sun will die of starvation, is sufficient to fight your way to hegemony. Because a sea of small polities is not, as a matter of fact, capable of executing a containment war against an initial-imperial-consolidation-wave behemoth emerging among them. (Typical Bronze Age empire, just without any bronze.) Sure, maybe the psychotic bloodthirsty stupidity part amplifies all hegemonies’ vulnerability to explosive deconsolidation, but it still works. Maybe running history some more would grind that down, so that you would get a much less abrasive boot instead, such as an Achaemenid or even Roman one.
____________________________________________________________
Just for the kicks, if I were to make a quite maximalist version of The Argument, it would go like this: “All the world’s a stage, all the men and women merely players [actors]. At least, this is the frame of mind to which an education in the humanities in general, and rhetoric in particular, predisposes one. The problem with this LARPistemology is that it confuses a thing being true with a thing being common knowledge, or it being assented to by those present. It makes no distinction — because it cannot — between a fake that has convinced everyone so far, and a real thing. That is, if I have a degree in Astrology and I can answer all questions like “O Astrologer, why did I stub my toe?” with genre-appropriate bullshit “because Jupiter is in the house of Libra”, then I am an astrologer. You may have come across the advice to never admit that you don’t know — that belongs to this worldview. (Corollary: education consists of learning the field-specific jargon, which is deliberately impenetrable, in order to exclude those who did not perform the proof-of-work.)”
“Regrettably, holding this view is perfectly compatible with attaining a high social position. If someone can perform kingship — or its republican equivalent — well, by being pious and suchlike, they may have everything they need to convince their fellows that they would make a good consul. Unfortunately, having a magnetic stage presence does not solve logistics, or economics, or an avalanche of snow, or a contagious pestilence, or a competent enemy army. (Under some circumstances, it may solve some parts of diplomacy, though! Meeting in person with peer kings and/or other principes *might* lead to them becoming pals.)”
“I must again emphasize that having this frame is very useful in describing some phenomena. Look at, for instance, medicine through this lens, and thus squeeze it into the schema of the astrologer. By admitting only the effects with direct social (“dramatic”) relevance, those that happen within “the stage”, the LARP, and ignoring referents outside it, it looks no different from e.g. homeopathy. And precisely by excluding such referents in reality (as distinct from what people believe), lacking a conceptual hook for it, this view can’t help but misconstrue knowledge as some form of unearned-within-the-improv-play confidence, or obstinacy, or an assertion of authority. Incidentally, if an attempt is made to resist what is perceived as an intrusion onto one’s turf, it very characteristically takes the shape of describing the other field with the negative-valence words from one’s own field. These tend to peter out by one side or another losing interest, rather than a negotiated agreement, because the form of a putative deal would have to be “I won’t call your physics an ill omen if you won’t call my astrology false”, which is just too silly for either side to take seriously.”
“To summarize, focusing excessive attention and training on rhetoric tends to make one, perhaps not incapable of strategy as such, but predictably bad at it. This both by leaving one with a stunted cognitive toolset (logistics, economics, opponents who make their Will save) and liable to make specific strategic sins (emotive strategy in particular: mixing up the process of getting the audience to condemn The Enemy with the actuality of delivering military coercion onto The Enemy).“
Brett can correct me, but ‘rhetoric’ to the classical mind was a training in reasoned thought together with the means to express this in persuasive terms. The modern version is the Oxbridge PPE degree (Philosophy, Politics and Economy), whose graduates staff much of the British civil service and political class.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. It isn’t very easy to staff a civil service of half a million with the output of a single course at a single university (it’s not “Oxbridge”, just Oxford) which produces about two hundred graduates a year.
And, to take a senior post at random, there has never been a Cabinet Secretary who read PPE.
I think that the key here is that with the communications available to premodern or early modern societies, you can’t really do anything but strategy. All the instructions you give to an office holder need to accept that the commander or administrator in the field must have a lot of leeway, and the instructions specify general lines about how to act and what to aim at.
In this sense, the key to successful strategy is a shared cultural basis between the office holders. You can see this in the fact that many empires (e.g Persian great kings and Romans) wanted to have a lot of young noblemen of their allies getting their education in the capital. When your officeholders share the cultural expectations and the way of thinking, the grand strategy of the empire is perpetuated exactly in the rhetoric and philosophy that are being taught to the members of the elite.
“the Roman republic with their one year offices could not enact real long time strategies”
This depends on whether changing people in an office actually changes the goals of that office.
If the only candidates more or less agree on what they’re going to do and it’s just a question of which one does it, you can have a long term strategy. The small closed class that was eligible, all trained more or less the same way from childhood, tends toward this solution.
The holder of the office if British Prime Minister changed twice in the Second World War, once in the First World War, and I don’t know how many times during the Napoleonic Wars, without the policy towards the major enemy obviously ever changing at all.
A country with a collegiate leadership is not likely to be fighting a major war at all without a high degree of unity on the matter at hand. So swapping the office-holders around might make little difference.
This is well demonstrated by the Afghan War: the American commander usually served about six months’ tour of duty, I think. Naturally, this is really so short a time that the commander has very little capability to do actual strategy, just tactics. You get a lot of minor ripples in the organization, but little large-scale change.
The same goes in many service clubs: the practice of having the president of the chapter change yearly is a way to maintain continuity. Every officeholder has so little time to execute their eventual novel ideas that they can mainly continue along the well-trodden path.
A man like Ceasar or Pompey the Great, with a multi-year mandates, could actually devise their own strategy. A yearly officeholder could just act in accordance with the strategic culture.
“The holder of the office if British Prime Minister changed twice in the Second World War, once in the First World War, and I don’t know how many times during the Napoleonic Wars, without the policy towards the major enemy obviously ever changing at all.”
I don’t know about this, to be honest. Pitt was much more hard-line than Addington; I doubt you’d have had the Peace of Amiens with Pitt still in office. And then again in 1806-7 you can see a definite shift from Greville trying to achieve some sort of peace deal to Portland and Perceval with a much more aggressive policy.
And policy towards Britain’s major enemy, Germany, was radically different under Attlee from policy under Churchill, because when Attlee took office we weren’t at war with Germany!
“I doubt you’d have had the Peace of Amiens with Pitt still in office.”
Fair enough, but less than eighteen months later Addington was declaring war on France again.
“when Attlee took office we weren’t at war with Germany”
True, but that is hardly evidence that his taking office changed policy towards Germany in an important way. The war had already ended. Meanwhile, the war with Japan continued.
“traditions codified in Babylon and by the Achaemenids which still occur in modern monarchies”
Um, such as?
The Achaemenids were the divinely-blessed family charged with bring the peace and justice of Ahura-Mazda to all peoples. It’s an older concept, but they made it much more prominent. It’s a concept that, for instance, the Carolingians would have grasped instantly (and it’s not a universal one to monarchy).
How is that different from Chinese and Japanese conceptions of the nature and purpose of monarchy and the imperial dynasty specifically?
It’s different in that the kings of Europe definitely didn’t learn the idea from the Chinese or the Japanese, but might have learned it from the Persians by the way of Greek and Roman transmission. I don’t feel confident enough to replace the ‘might’ with a ‘did,’ but that’s the general shape of the answer to your question.
If we’re talking about “Western civilization” in a meaningful sense, then it needs to be a cluster of cultures, ways of life, and concepts of statecraft, philosophy, religion, scholarship, and so forth that stretch back to a common reference pool.
For the Europe-centered “West,” this common reference pool clearly runs back to the Greeks and Romans, but the Greeks and Romans were very much conscious that they were adapting many of the core ideas of their society from earlier or contemporary societies such as the Phoenicians, Persians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Babylonians.
The catch is that most of the Islamic Middle East is also ultimately getting much of its culture from those same sources, including significant Roman and Greek influences.
A definition of ‘the Western World’ can be easily made much more consistent and coherent by defining the Islamic sphere of civilizations and the ‘Christendom’ sphere as both being ‘Western,’ albeit with quite a bit of divergence and ‘speciation’ taking place over the past 1500 years. But then, Sweden and Spain aren’t identical either.
The Greeks and Romans mostly didn’t have kings. It’s possible that medieval European ideas of kingship somehow leapfrogged the classical inheritance and reached back to Sumeria or Persia (despite medieval Europe being almost totally ignorant of those cultures), but I would need to see some very strong evidence for that proposition. To me, medieval ideas of monarchy seem most plausibly explained as a fusion of Celtic and Teutonic tribal traditions with Christianity. The similarity with East Asian ideas reflects the nature of kingship, or perhaps of humans generally.
(This is trying to respond to ey81 below but for some reason their post doesn’t have a Reply link.)
Medieval Europeans knew little to nothing of ancient Sumeria, but they knew quite a lot about ancient Israel and Judea. The “Christian” ideas of kingship are really the Israelite and Judean ideas, there being no kings (other than God and Caesar, who don’t count for this purpose) in the New Testament, so the models for a Christian king had to come from the Old Testament. (Notice that the modern British coronation ceremony still sings “Zadok the Priest”!)
The Israelite ideas of kingship were heavily influenced by their Levantine neighbors’ ideas of kingship, which ultimately derive from the sources mentioned.
>The Greeks and Romans mostly didn’t have kings.
They did, though. Near-eastern kingship is very influnetial on how the diadochi present themsleves, and that (along with some persian stuff) then in turn influences the roman emperors (especially during the Dominate, which let us remember, is the version of Rome that gets passed down directly to western europeans.
Arguably the political history of europe for the next…. 1000 years or so after the fall of Rome is kings from a germanic-tribal system trying to (with various success) re-create the roman model of rulership.
The idea of the king being divine occurs over and over.
I think it’s a long term answer to “Why should do what you say?”
– If you’re organized by family, this can be “because I am your father and I know more”. This can be extended to clan/tribe level, where they are considered related.
– You can do this short term via tyranny, i.e. “do this or I kill you.” But this only works short term, unless you’re willing and able to enslave people, and keep them enslaved. Which has a large apparatus.
– or you say “I’m appointed by the gods” or “I’m descended from the gods”. This fits into the transactional nature of polytheism and classic question of how to tell whether a prophet is real: does doing what this guy says lead to more stuff?
The Chinese/Japanese have the Mandate of Heaven. The Egyptians had the divine family of the Pharoah. Most of what we know about the Myceneans had the kings as being by-blows of one god or another.
For that matter, the current King of England has a family tree that has Odin in there somewhere…
My point is that this isn’t unique enough to the Achaemenids to have been borrowed from them by the rest of the West. When you worship the gods (appease and/or trade with them), claiming descent, or at least a special “in”, seems pretty obvious.
I’m personally coming round to ‘The West’ as including the Middle East, and any efforts to segregate the two are rooted in Islamophobia (which is the 21st century’s iteration of anti-Semitism in the 30s – not that good old fashion anti-Semitism has disappeared either).
If you wanted to differentiate the two, the only lines I would draw that could stick would be ‘The part of the West that mostly did the colonising plus their present-day allies’ and ‘the part of the West that was mostly colonised’. And yes, this probably includes Turkey and Russia in the ‘colonising West’ bracket.
The similarity with East Asian ideas reflects the nature of kingship, or perhaps of humans generally.
I certainly wouldn’t say that monarchy is natural or inevitable, but yes, I’d say that it certainly does *build on* traits that are generally shared in human psychology across cultures. Kingship in tropical Africa and Polynesia certainly wasn’t borrowed from Persian ideas, after all.
@Jonathan Lennox
Don’t forget the Herodian dynasty! As long as we’re talking kings in general and not just those who could be treated as positive examples, of course.
“If you wanted to differentiate the two, the only lines I would draw that could stick would be ‘The part of the West that mostly did the colonising plus their present-day allies’ and ‘the part of the West that was mostly colonised’.”
On which side of the line would you put the US?
@ajaybell I would put the USA firmly in the ‘coloniser West’ bracket. The moment native Americans get a meaningful say in the national and international policy of the United States (beyond their subsumed micro-nations), I’ll be happy to reassess that.
‘The part of the West that mostly did the colonising plus their present-day allies’ and ‘the part of the West that was mostly colonised’. And yes, this probably includes Turkey and Russia in the ‘colonising West’ bracket.
@Ynneadwraith,
I think there’s a lot to this, although I would exclude Turkey and Russia for other reasons. Of course, it also means you would need to exclude Latin America and most of Eastern and Eastern-Central Europe (which I would agree with).
Good luck trying to graft Zoroastrian thoughts onto the Chinese or Japanese imperial systems. It is not hard to trace Zoroastrian precepts into Christianity, particularly Christian understanding of the devil and Zoroastrian understanding of Ahriman. If you did a philosophical family tree of late Roman Christianity Zoroastrianism would be one of the branches; if you did a similar philosophical family tree of Tang Confucianism I think it would be a struggle to include Zoroastrianism as one on the branches.
You *would* end up with a weird crosspollination via Manicheanism, but it’s a very tenous connection.
Well, the traditional Chinese concept of rulers does not assume a divinely-chosen family, while the Japanese does. So even lumping them together seems problematic.
Roman rulers were assumed to have some portion of divine favour, but it was not heritable – emperor always had more the character of an office’ (with kin having first dibs). Islamic rule, where not drawing on the Iranian or steppe tradition (Osmanli. Mughals) – has the same character. Swineherds or smart sergeants don’t get to be king in Europe, still less ex-slave black eunuchs (see Abu al-Misk Kafur).
Swineherds or smart sergeants don’t get to be king in Europe, still less ex-slave black eunuchs (see Abu al-Misk Kafur).
On that point, Iran ended up with a “commoner” military officer as king, as late as the 1920s.
This is a great point. Many European peasant rebellions were quite desperate to find noblemen of high rank as leaders, because they were conscious that they needed Noble leadership to get legitimacy. For example, many leaders of Transylvania had serious problems with their relatively low birth that prevented them from getting allied.
Similarly, Gustavus Vasa of Sweden and his sons had the same issue, Gustavus being an untitled nobleman. Getting elected in accordance with old, semi-barbaric law was not enough to build international legitimacy.
“Swineherds or smart sergeants don’t get to be king in Europe, still less ex-slave black eunuchs (see Abu al-Misk Kafur).”
You couldn’t be more wrong about this. The current monarch of Sweden is literally descended from someone who got to be king in Sweden, which is in Europe, after having been a smart sergeant. Smart in the sense of well turned-out; his nickname was “Sergeant Belle-Jambe”. And while I couldn’t find an example of a swineherd king, Karadjordje Petrovic, founder of the Serbian royal house, was a former shepherd.
@ajay,
I think that your points are not very good. Serbia and Sweden are both quite marginal areas. Bernadotte’s rise was possible only due to extreme political upheaval in Europe – and due to the fact that Sweden actually had a semi-parliamentary system and historically, an unstable monarchy: between 1523 and 1814, only Ericus XIV, Charles XI, Charles XII and Gustavus IV Adolphus inherited the power quite regularly without some constitutional complication – and of these, Ericus XIV and Gustavus IV lost the throne to coups. In every other case, there were constitutional complications. Swedes were uncommonly used to tweaking their succession order and modifying their written constitution.
So, both your counter-examples of commoners risng to monarchs are only demonstrating that this only happened on the margins of European system.
“I think that your points are not very good. Serbia and Sweden are both quite marginal areas. ”
As, of course, is Scotland, which gave its name to the “No True Scotsman” fallacy on display here.
What about Basil I? Well, Byzantium is only marginally Europe. Diocletian? He was an emperor, not a king. Joachim of Naples? Not really from a poor background, his father was solidly middle-class, and anyway Naples is only marginally Europe. Catherine the Great? Well, Russia is only marginally Europe.
@ajay,
Peter the Great’s second wife, Martha Skowronskaya, seems to have been a former serf, and eventually became Empress of Russia in her own right, maybe even a better example than Catherine.
@ajay,
I am not buying here into the argument that the European monarchist ideology would be heir to Babylon. However, your points are still bad: Napoleonic monarchies were, on the whole, an aberration. Napoleon tried to build a dynasty with his kinsmen on various thrones, which didn’t give him nor his kinsmen legitimacy. On the contrary, they were all toppled by the widest European alliance ever seen. Bernadotte was the only one who survived, and this was because he hadn’t been installed by Napoleon, but by Swedish revolutionaries who didn’t understand that they were inviting Napoleon’s old political rival as their king.
Diocletian was Roman, and Rome of his time had no tradition of orderly succession by noble blood (or of orderly succession). East Rome was not playing by the political rules of the early modern Europe. The ideology of monarchies being a preserve of royal blood is a real phenomenon, but it encompasses a narrower time and place: Western and Central Europe from about 1400 to 1789 and even after that, most new European monarchies took their monarchs from foreign royal houses, not from the domestic leaders, although the Napoleonic wars form a real discontinuity. Prior to 1400, you have a lot of elective monarchies, on the other hand.
And Catherine the Great was, BTW, a member of a royal house. She was a daughter of Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, and member of the Anhalt dynasty. By the contemporary rules of the royal marriage, she was a bride of equal dignity to the Russian tsarevich.
“And Catherine the Great was, BTW, a member of a royal house. She was a daughter of Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, and member of the Anhalt dynasty.”
Apologies – this was my mistake. I meant Catherine I! Sorry about that.
“your points are still bad: Napoleonic monarchies were, on the whole, an aberration.”
Yes! People becoming monarch after being born in very poor circumstances is always and everywhere an aberration! That doesn’t mean you can ignore it though.
“The ideology of monarchies being a preserve of royal blood is a real phenomenon, but it encompasses a narrower time and place: Western and Central Europe from about 1400 to 1789”
Right. We’re really narrowing this down a lot, aren’t we? We started with “Swineherds or smart sergeants don’t get to be king in Europe” and now we’ve got “Swineherds or smart sergeants don’t get to be king in Western and Central Europe in the Early Modern period” which is getting really close to the bold assertion that “the Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg existed”.
“People becoming monarch after being born in very poor circumstances is always and everywhere an aberration! ”
I’d hope so, because people who *achieved* monarch-hood usually did so through successful warlordism. If that was the usual way to become ruler, things were probably going pretty badly.
Thank you for this week’s book recommendation. It’s the first serious discussion of the Civil Rights Movement, and nonviolent resistance in general, which really clicked for me.
Are you familiar with S. Frederick Starr’s book “Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane”, by any chance? It doesn’t quite focus on Islamicate interactions with the Roman legacy, but I think it’s a really good look at how the Islamic world was deeply shaped by the Hellenistic past from a very early point — and especially once it reached Central Asia, where the Greco-Buddhist traditions of governance, philosophy and learning were still very much alive.
Only recently found your blog, and been going through some old articles gradually, and recently subscribed to keep up with anything new. I definitely appreciate at the start where you point out the risks of falling into either one of the pitfalls of what is obvious, I am a big proponent, in many areas, of avoiding relying on what seems like obvious common sense, without considering, could there be something I’m missing it here that explains why people think differently. Given the way people work, there is pretty much always more to the story.
Ave, Ollie!!
The more I read about scholarly debates, the more I see that the tendency to WILDLY overcorrect when arguing against older flawed ideas seems to be pretty damn close to universal among historians.
Not just historians.
Yes, I also think that.
For example, I have the impression that the heavy anti-industrial policy sentiments* of economists in the years (or decades?) around 2000 had at least partially been an overcorrection against the failures of import substitution industrialisation.
Which I find a bit odd, as there are much more ways to do industrial policy than engaging in Latin-American ‘consumer goods autarkism’, like credit subsidies; but then there are many other things I find at least a bit odd.
* Such sentiments still exist but are now, I think, less common and less extreme.
I read the first couple paragraphs of the linked Luttwak article and hoo boy of all the things that are made up, he made them up the most
In one Discord I’m in we have a joke about having to constantly reset the “X days since a semantic argument” sign because it turns out the heated debates were people talking past each other, and I feel the strategy argument has shades of that. One side is talking about numbers and geography – “How could the Romans have made a strategic decision not to invade Ireland if they had no idea how big it was and a really bad idea about where it was?” The other is looking at this through an output lens – “How could deciding to build a wall across north England to keep the Scots out, instead of trying to conquer them *not* be a strategic decision?”
“How could the Romans have made a strategic decision not to invade Ireland if they had no idea how big it was and a really bad idea about where it was?”
It strikes me as a perfectly sensible decision, strategic or otherwise, to not invade Ireland if you don’t know where it is or what you will find if you get there. So I don’t see how that decision is meant to demonstrate a lack of strategy.
I’m in agreement with you (and so is Bret), but the logic runs as follows: Due to the lack of knowledge, the ends (“Have Ireland”) are not actually clearly defined and thus any tailoring of operations and means towards that end can’t happen – you don’t know how many legions it would take to conquer because you don’t know how big it is.
I think we actually have a counter-example. I have not read the exact original document, nor do I remember the source, but I think that Roman general Agricola estimated that conquering Ireland would take about a legion, permanently stationed there – which seems correct, bsed on Roman experience elsewhere. And I am quite confident that anyone could estimate the wealth of Ireland simply by making some inquiries around the ports of England to estimate what kind of commerce there was with them. A few months’ job for a bright young tribunus angusticlavius.
The point is that you can get pretty good rough estimates with surprisingly little – and getting more exact estimates takes staggering amount of resources.
I think it’s a difference in what we mean when we say we know something. I’m not being overly-pedantic, I swear! The Industrial Revolution and the rise of science have colored our perspective of what it means to know something–basically, only that which can be measured can be considered known. In the past, though, they didn’t think in terms of significant figures and the like. They couldn’t; they lacked the technology, they often lacked the vocabulary, and their worldview was too different. They were, however, capable of compiling data and making accurate predictions based on it–see Rome’s record of victories.
Given the time of year, it’s worth pointing out that “A Christmas Carol” offers good examples of each way of thinking, and the tensions that arise when different ways of thinking collide. Scrooge is a very mathematical, scientific thinker, to the point of being inhuman. Most of the rest of the characters are older, less-number-oriented thinkers. Much of the conflict, outside the visitations, arises from the conflict between these views, at least in the commercial line. (Dickins was not subtle as to which he considered the correct way of thinking.)
Rome obviously knew Ireland existed. They didn’t “know” Ireland in the modern sense. But they knew it existed, and apparently (I take Finnish reader at their word) had a good idea of how to conquer it. I don’t think their lack of mathematical knowledge was a key factor in preventing the invasion, though. They never let such things stop them in the past, after all. I think internal factors–politics and religion–played a bigger part.
They collected enough information to make a judgement as to whether the return would be worth the cost, and decided it wasn’t. They made the same judgement with regard to highland Scotland, the Germanic forests, Dacia once the mines played out, Mesopotamia once Persian power revived and so on.
Persia is an example of their different mindset. They did invade once, and nearly conquered it–until their emperor got stuck by lightning, which they took as a sign from the gods and went back home. While I’m sure the president getting struck by lightning would cause a stir today (regardless of who’s in office; this is an a-political statement), I’m not sure it would cause us to abandon an overall successful campaign.
But more fundamentally, the nature of that information was different. What type of information they thought necessary and sufficient is different enough from what we’d consider necessary and sufficient today that this is an area where I think extreme caution should be taken to avoid casting modern ideas backwards.
Maybe I missed or was supposed to infer it but did Rome plant colonies for strategic reasons or was it, perhaps, something they did because that was their custom (and the first time few times someone did it for political reasons or something).
A spontaneous request: do you have a recommendation for a survey text of the Ancient Mediterranean? Something that covers pre-Roman Iberia to Phoenicia and not just covering the Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians?
I am fairly sure that there were times when our sources tell us that the Romans were explicitly saying to one another “let us pacify this region by building a colony that will loyally resupply our legions as they pass through and shift the demographics in our favor,” just using different words to express the same idea.
Certainly, the Romans did found a great many such colonies and it seems a bit of a strain to imagine that they were doing it purely because “that’s the custom” when their entire political class consisted of veterans of military campaigns where they were constantly relying on colonies for support whenever possible.
At least in the Republic there would have been a tension for a retiree from the legion between “settle here with a lot of land” versus “go home and nail my battel honors to the door for the neighbors to marvel at.”
There would have been “do I have enough to marry”, etc. questions. Since farming as a bachelor just doesn’t work.
Hello, great piece! In short, would you recommend Lacey’s work (Strategy of Empire) over Luttwak’s for someone who wants to read more on the subject? Looking forward to your article, cheers.
In the first paragraph you wrote “the hoplite debate (the othismos over othismos)”. Am I missing the point or should it be othismos over another Greek word?
Othismos roughly means “melee” or “hand-to-hand combat”, so the pun is that the hoplite debate is a fight over fighting.
Even more interesting than that! The literal meaning of othismos is “pushing” or, to be even more on point, “shoving match”. Not to preempt next week, I only recommend this comment and thread from two years ago.
Thank you.
I suspected I was missing something but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
The debate about Romans having strategy has always struck me as a semantic black hole. If by “strategy” you mean rational planning to accomplish a goal with limited resources in the face of opposition, then of course they did it, like every society (and probably some animals). But if you define strategy as “using modern analytical methods to devise such plans” then no, they didn’t and they couldn’t – and neither did anyone else until the late 19th Century.
People on either side of the debate are talking right past each other because they’re actually talking about different things. And when they do engage, it quickly descends into an argument over which definition is correct – a pointlessly prescriptivist fight that accomplishes nothing.
The more interesting question IMO (and the one scholarship has been moving towards) is “How institutionalised was Roman strategy making?” Was it the general / emperor going by personal experience and a hunch? Or was there an established process to make the decision based on prior examination of deeply researched case studies, war gaming, etc…? There’s a continuum to these extremes, which is analogous to the difference between an anecdote and a scientific experiment. Knowing where on this spectrum the Romans sat (and how it moved during their history) seems like a very rich vein to explore that actually says something substantive about history, rather than merely the modern words used to describe it.
Leaving religion out of a definition of Western seems to rather ignore a lot of history. As in about a thousand years of it. The historical conflict between Islam and Christianity is significant culturally on both sides (note Arab complaints about the Crusades, among other things).
Notably, the Arab/Islamic world doesn’t see themselves as successors of the Roman Empire. To the extent they relate to it, they far more see themselves as conquerors of it. Western Europe does (rightly or wrongly) largely see themselves as successors of the Romans. Given the 500-1000 years of history based on those perceptions, and the numerous actual differences in culture that derive from them, yes the two are distinct.
Western Europe (and some bits of Eastern Europe) have/had continuity of religion with Rome. The calendar is Roman-derived. The alphabet is Roman (or, at minimum, Greek)-derived. The languages are almost all Roman or Greek-derived (and where not is heavily influenced). They used Roman numerals. The laws were often Roman-derived (or, at least, derived from someone who would run around saying he was Roman). None of those things are true of the Islamic world, and it shows. The difference is NOT just religion, though that is a huge factor.
The Slavs and Ottoman Turks can be a tough fit in this, having elements where they fit and elements where they don’t. Historically, ‘are they Western’ would have different answers at different times and sometimes be ‘sort-of.’ So frankly, this definition seems pretty solid.
“The historical conflict between Islam and Christianity is significant culturally on both sides (note Arab complaints about the Crusades, among other things).”
There’s an entire debate about the degree to which that is really a thing or not. or whether or not it is a retrojection. (you see a similar discussion about Korean-Japanese relations and the perspective on the Imjin War)
IE: Was these historical incidents *actually* formative or where they brought up later as a result of (19th/20th century) colonialism and then used as cudgels for that debate?
I should also note that while Islam and christianity have their differences they are, arguably, way more alike than they are different, compared to buddhism, hinduism, or the various smaller religions. I think the argument that by looking at religion you make the grouping *tighter* not looser.
You also erase a lot of unique cultures and religions that existed in Europe for a long time. This creates a LOT of problems. The most mild is probably temporal–by defining “the West” as Christiandom you set the start date around the time of Constantine. This is mild because that may in fact be justifiable; the idea of “the West” didn’t really exist until Rome split her empire in half, after all.
More significantly, this definition contributes to the ongoing erasure of religions that aren’t Christianity. This includes a lot of (essentially ALL) European religions. Put simply, this definition is propaganda designed to remove these religions from consideration by defining them as outsiders unworthy of protection. To be clear, I’m not saying that anyone here is making that argument. It’s far older than any living person. But the impacts are not negligible. Open violence against non-Christian religious practices is ongoing–there was a rather severe attack last month, for example, and more minor (but no less significant) disruptions of religious practices are routine to the point of being expected. Imagine the uproar if folks routinely disrupted a Catholic mass…..
This isn’t just an issue with Neopaganism and Revivalist movements. What qualifies as Christiandom is a question that has led to the shedding of a significant amount of blood in the past. The Tyranny of Small Differences and all that; points of theology that are minor to the point of being trivial to outsider have led to (or, more cynically, have been used as post-hoc justification for) wars between groups that any outsider would consider Christan.
Another issue is that Christiandom wasn’t static. It extended well past Europe even in the Middle Ages (again, see the Roman Empire). And it didn’t include all of Europe (see the Reconquista). This definition of “the West” obfuscates more than it reveals.
I think there IS a value in the term, and use it frequently myself. But I think most of that value is rather late in history. Europe engaged in a great deal of colonization, with profound global impacts; victory or defeat in Europe impacted who was in charge in Africa, India, South America, North America, etc. And during the Cold War the term had real geopolitical value. But the term has never been literal. It’s necessarily going to include Australia, for example, and these days almost certainly should include Japan. A better term should be created, but “the West” has the value of being generally understood, which makes coining new terms difficult.
I think that the Islamic-Christian conflict was somewhat unique, because the frontier on the Mediterranean was, until the 19th century, in rather constant state of unpeace. It was possible for any coastal settlement to be raided without actual warning like formal declaration of war, and there were always actors who considered themselves justified in waging religious-inspired war against commerce (e.g Knights Hospitallers and Barbary corsairs). Most remarkably, it was not really possible to get legally enslaved by fellow religionists, but both Christians and Muslims were happy to enslave the people of the other faith.
This is in major contrast to, say, the Baltic, where piracy was much less of an issue, reflected even in the types of ships and articles of commerce: Mediterranean ships were lighter and carried more expensive cargo, because bulk freight was not feasible due to larger risk.
I would answer Dinwar’s critique of forgetting other European religions by simply noting that for 1,500 years, any non-established religions were mainly interesting as subjects of ethnography or criminology.
“I would answer Dinwar’s critique of forgetting other European religions by simply noting that for 1,500 years, any non-established religions were mainly interesting as subjects of ethnography or criminology.”
Criminology wasn’t a thing until the 19th century. Prior to that concepts of justice, evidence, and guilt/innocence were very, very different. There’s a reason we don’t put pigs on trial anymore, and why we don’t have trial by combat anymore, things that occurred in those 1,500 years. In many cases it wasn’t necessary for accusations to even be plausible, much less true; as long as it accomplished the goal you could make up whatever wild stories you wanted. In a civilization where the fastest means of communication was “man on horse” and nobles were considered to be divinely given authority over the peasants (often BY THE PEASANTS), no one’s going to question you. Prima Nocta is the perennial example of such an accusation–something that everyone accused everyone else of, but which never, as far as we can tell, actually happened.
And it’s not like the historic differences in religions is confined to the past. Germany in the early 20th century was heavily influenced by their understanding of pre-Christian cultures, for example. Regardless of your views of that culture, one can hardly call them insignificant (yes, I’m aware that they were ostensibly Christian; the influence of pre-Christian mythologies was also present).
I was going to mention Native American groups in the previous paragraph, but I think this better serves as an example of a current issue that defining “the West” by Christianity causes. The USA is generally considered part of “the West”, yet includes a lot of native groups that were and are emphatically NOT Christian. This definition has been used to justify all sorts of atrocities, and while mass murder, forced baptisms, and forced deportation and the like are not currently in vogue, advocates for such things do exist. I mean, I recently took the kids to a rodeo where they paraded out a Christian nationalist flag alongside Old Glory. How comfortable do you think the Creek or Choctaw are going to be in such situations?
I was going to mention Native American groups in the previous paragraph, but I think this better serves as an example of a current issue that defining “the West” by Christianity causes. The USA is generally considered part of “the West”, yet includes a lot of native groups that were and are emphatically NOT Christian
Uh, yes. I think the difference between us here is whether you consider Native Americans to be part of “the West”, or rather whether you consider them to be their own distinct nations that the West destroyed, conquered and subjugated. I would definitely take the second alternative. Otherwise you end up with the conclusion that everyone who’s a US citizen is civilizationally/culturally “western”, which seems absurd to me . I was born, live currently, and have citizenship in the US, but my civilizational and national affinities lie elsewhere.
You can actually make a pretty good argument that the distinction is between the “West” (the near-eastern/Hellenic synthesis) and the “East” (the dharmic/sinitic synthesis)
“The languages are almost all Roman or Greek-derived (and where not is heavily influenced)”
What, no. While there’s plenty of influence from greek and latin on western european languages it’s not like arabic isn’t influenced by both of those. (though especially greek)
But saying the languages are “almost all roman or greek-derived” is nonsense. The language wer’re typing this right now isn’t, for instance.
“But saying the languages are “almost all roman or greek-derived” is nonsense. ”
Agreed. SK should have added a qualifier – maybe something in brackets like “(and where not is heavily influenced)”. Then it would make sense.
“Some languages in the west are derived from latin, and the others are influenced by it” maybe.
OK, the languages of “the West” are all part of the same language family as Greek and Latin, and in many cases descended from one of them. In contrast, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Chinese, and Japanese (sorry if I left you out) all come from different language families.
The onyl languages taht descend from latin are the romance languages. Greek doesen’t even really have much in the way of descendants (there’s a couple of smaller languages but they’re not really a big deal, other than greek itself)
Hindi comes from the same langauge family as Persian (and latin for that matter) and arab and hebrew are fairly closely related so I’m honestly not sure what you’re on about here.
Hindi is an Indo-European language, just like English, Latin, Greek and Persian (though Persian is a much closer to it than the other mentioned languages).
I think that the Indo-European language family is not what you are striving at here. It is the fact that all European languages share a core of common terminology for concepts of the modern and early modern world. (In Finnish, we actually call these loan words sivistyssanat, “words of civilization”.) This heritage is largely Greco-Roman, with some Arabic, French and German sprinkled in. This is, however, by no means a Western phenomenon, as most languages of the world have borrowed a large portion of this vocabulary. (German and Greek being good counter-examples, as they have tended to use words based on national-language stems for the purposes.)
This makes it often possible to read e.g. a scientific text written in a strange language with at least some inkling about what it might be about.
I misspoke about Hindi. The others are not Indo-European, whereas substantially all European languages are, even if they are not Romance.
Quite simply, the Ottomans were calling themselves Caesars long before they were calling themselves Caliphs. Moreover, the Holy Cities on the Red Sea existed to trade to the Romans, the Red Sea coast was very much part of the Roman World even though some of it was not in any province. To say there was no Islamic perspective that saw continuity with Rome is to invent a whole new history for Islam that isn’t supported by much at all.
People in medieval Europe were as happy to tell stories about Achaemenid Persians or Old Testament Judeans as Greek philosophers or Roman magistrates. They were all Jews and pagans so misbelievers from exotic places long ago, and they could all teach useful lessons like “when the teenager standing between you and the throne asks you to swap armour with him, ask for a changeroom.”
The French have never been sure whether they were Romans, Franks, or Gauls. The peoples of the British Isles invented their own foundation legends involving Trojans and Scythians and Hengst and Horsa and were not always sure what was a Roman ruin and what was made by giants or faeries or sorcerers.
“Quite simply, the Ottomans were calling themselves Caesars long before they were calling themselves Caliphs. ”
Is this right? Surely they only called themselves Kayser-i-Rum after 1453 – but at least if Wiki is to be relied on, several sultans were using the title of caliph before that.
Hmmm I only found a single line on the wiki and it’s without citation. I’d like to know more since what I know is that they definitely claim it after conquest of Mamluk.
I seem to recall they started calling themselves that in anticipation under Bayezid? Once they were on the european side, IE: Rumelia.
I’m going entirely by Wiki so I may very well be wrong, but it says that Mehmet II was the first of the Ottomans to call himself Kayser-i-Rum. And thinking about it, it would have been odd for any of his predecessors to do that, because presumably, to an Ottoman, “Kayser-i-Rum” before 1453 would have been the Byzantine Emperor. Bayezid called himself Sultan-i-Rum, which is maybe what you’re thinking of?
They called themselves Kayser-i-Rum to boast about their conquest of Rome, not because they wanted to continue the Roman tradition. Like British monarches called themselves Kaisar-i-Hind.
Agreed. They called themselves Kayser-i-Rum because that was historically the title of the guy who ran Constantinople, and when Mehmet became that guy, he took the title.
The British example is slightly different I think – as far as I know the Mughal emperors didn’t call themselves Kaisar-i-Hind, that was a title created de novo by Disraeli for Queen Victoria. The Mughals called themselves Padishah but not Kaisar-i-Hind.
Yikes. Writing for the Beacon really puts an author in a certain light. It’s a bit like writing for Breitbart, if Breitbart gave up trying to keep any distance from Stormfront.
“Strategy is simply the selection of a goal (‘ends’) and the coordination of methods (‘ways’) and resources (‘means’) to achieve that goal”
This seems far too weak. By this definition of strategy, sure, Romans did it, but so do squirrels (end: survive winter; means: some acorns; ways: cache ’em for later).
I think it’s a bit strange to assume that although *formal* Roman education was literary, the military and government institutions didn’t have informal traditions of strategic and military thought that were learned on the job.