Civilizations represent continuities in human thought and practices through which different human groups attempt to grapple with their consciousness of present problems. At some times, these continuities appear to be vigorous, reaffirmed, even redefined. At other times, they are obscured, subordinated to other dominant modes of thought and practices. At such times and for such groups talk of civilizations is absent, suppressed or seemingly irrelevant.
When and why do civilizations become a significant object of knowledge?
For three decades and more, knowledge about world affairs in the West and in the Soviet sphere was constructed predominantly with reference to the Cold War. Its pre-eminent form in international relations theory, particu- larly in its American expression, was neo-realism, a problem-solving form of knowledge applicable to super power rivalry. Neo-realism was a technology of power based upon the premise of a common rationality shared by both sides in the US–Soviet conflict in which game theoretic exercises and rational choice hypotheses could be taken as guides for policy understandable in the same way by both sides.
Once the overarching control of the Cold War was lifted, the underlying but obscured diversity of the human situation became more fully apparent and neo-realism lost its monopoly of explaining the world and proposing action. But the salience of the Cold War was succeeded by the salience of globalization: the vision of the inevitable homogenization of economic and cultural practices, driven by competitiveness in a global market and by new technologies of communication.
There is, however, a historical dialectical resistance to this vision of global homogenization – an affirmation of diversity through many forms of iden- tity: gender, ethnic, religious, linguistic, attachment to the land, and a sense of historical grievance and humiliation. The two most prevalent forms of identity of the earlier twentieth century – nationality and class – are sub- merged, though not eliminated, in these other forms. The largest aggregate of identity is the civilization. Globalization is countered by the affirmation of civilizations in this dialectic of homogenization and diversification. This is the basic reason for a revival of concern about civilizations.
How should we theorize civilizations and their role in this future world?
What are the implications for international studies? In approaching an answer to these questions it is necessary to determine a conceptual framework. Since the problem is historical, this framework has to be adapted to the movement of history. Concepts that are fixed and timeless freeze movement into an eternal present. Historical concepts must, as E. P. Thompson (1978, pp.
229–42) affirmed, be elastic. They must give a clear direction to thinking while allowing for the continuing transformations of the historical process.
Historically relevant concepts arise from a dialogue between social being and social consciousness, between the empirical evidence of what exists and the manner in which people become aware of its existence. In this vein, I discuss three themes in this chapter:
1 The changing awareness of civilizations in Western thought. ( For some- one born into the Western tradition, this is a necessary reflexive exercise in self-awareness as a precondition to awareness of other civilizations.) 2 A workable definition of the entity ‘civilization’. What is a civilization?
3 The dimensions of the concept of ‘civilization’ which can be a means of analysing the dynamics of civilizational change.
The changing awareness of civilizations in Western thought
The origin of the word ‘civilization’ is traceable to eighteenth-century France (Braudel, 1994; Elias, 1994). In German, the word Kulturassumed compara- ble significance about the same time. Both had the connotation of a process of increasing civility, the antithesis of barbarity. The context was the emer- gence of the bourgeoisie as a strong social force – in France more closely linked into state power as the noblesse de robe, in Germany more separate and having its stronghold in the universities. The civilizing process was conceived as a universal phenomenon characterizing the Enlightenment of eighteenth- century Europe, at one with universal reason and natural laws applicable in the physical sciences, economics, law and morality. The finality of the process was civilization in the singular.
The Enlightenment perspective of civility was soon challenged by the romantic movement which rejected the notion of an objective world gov- erned by universal laws and striving towards the attainment of universal norms of law and morals. The romantic thinkers gave more place to subjec- tivity and uniqueness. Each distinctive national culture had its own aim and destiny in world history. Herder in Germany, Michelet in France, Burke in England voiced this counter-perspective to the universalism of the Enlightenment. The theme was developed later during the nineteenth century by German historicism (e.g. by Wilhelm Dilthey). The European expansion- ism of the nineteenth century gave substance to these philosophical leanings.
Les bourgeois conquérants– to borrow the phrase of Charles Morazé (1957) – encountered other civilizations. Civilization in the singular gave way to civi- lizations in the plural. But imperialism and its accompanying scholarship
now defined the non-European civilizations as objects of knowledge.
European civilization (and its American offshoot) was to be thought of as dynamic, an active agent inspired by the doctrine of Progress. Non-European civilizations were thought of as passive and fixed.
Conditions during the later nineteenth century – the long depression of the last three decades, the social conflicts arising from urbanization and indus- trialization, the social transformations that Tönnies described as from Gemeinschaft toGesellschaftand Durkheim as from mechanical to organic solidarity, and ultimately the imperialist rivalries that led to World War I – encouraged scepticism about the doctrine of Progress. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West(1939), the first major European work of the twentieth century on the theme of civilizations, reflected this more pessimistic mood.
The manuscript was substantially completed just before the outbreak of World War I and was worked over and published in 1918 in the context of German defeat. The English translation was published in 1926 and 1928. Its pessimism resonated to the era of the Great Depression and the rise of fas- cism.1
Spengler saw history as recording the birth, maturity and decline of a number of civilizations, each with a distinct spirit. This he called his
‘Copernican revolution’. Europe and the West was not the centre around which other societies revolved; it was one among other civilizations, each of which followed a predetermined sequence of stages; and European civiliza- tion was entering into its final phase. His approach elaborated upon the visions of Giambattista Vico (1970) and the romantics of the earlier nine- teenth century. Spengler’s thoughts for his own time focused on what remained possible for Western civilization to achieve during its inexorable decline.
The other great work on civilizations of the first half of the twentieth cen- tury, Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History (1946, 1957), was more optimistic in tone since it envisaged the possibility of rebirth of civilization through a religious revival. This monumental work was published in a series of volumes through the 1930s. Its major impact came after World War II and was quite important especially in the United States. A major promoter of Toynbee’s work in America was Henry Luce, the publisher ofTime,Life, and Fortune magazines. Luce seized upon Toynbee’s concept of the ‘universal state’ as the ultimate stage of a civilization and put the United States in the role of creator of a new universal state for the world. He signed an editorial in Life,entitled ‘The American Century’, which reflected the internationalist and interventionist views of the Eastern Establishment against American isolationism.Timepublished an influential summary of Toynbee’s work by Whittaker Chambers, the ex-communist soon to attain renown as the princi- pal witness in the trial and conviction of Alger Hiss. Luce undoubtedly enhanced Toynbee’s reputation, but his use of the work deviated from Toynbee’s own preoccupation with religion as the road to salvation for civi- lizations as well as individual souls.2
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Luce’s appropriation of Toynbee placed emphasis once again upon civi- lization in the singular – the creation of a single all-embracing American-inspired world order. As the Cold War came to dominate thinking about the future of the world, the choice seemed to be between two forms of universalism, capitalism and communism, both derived from the European Enlightenment. The sense of coexistence of a plurality of civilizations was obscured. Whatever was not pertinent to the Cold War did not matter in the top levels of world politics. Of course, at the lower levels, the Cold War was less a matter of concern than the daily struggle for survival in conditions of poverty and deprivation, the subordination of peoples to imperialism, and various forms of discrimination. But such sentiments were obscured in the top-down view of the Cold War.
Voices from what came to be called the Third World were indeed heard in the West (for example, Panikkar, 1953). Even in the West, the dominant manichean vision was challenged, though not much weakened, by sources outside mainstream thought. In the immediate post-war period, the most innovative journal of history in France, the Annales, dropped the word his- toirefrom its title and substituted Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations(Daix, 1995, p. 214). The use of the plural for civilizations was significant, but this brand of historical study was not fully accepted by the university elite and only began to make an impact in the English-speaking world in the 1980s, particularly through the influence of Fernand Braudel.3These negations of the bipolar Cold War paradigm remained an undercurrent. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 is now seen as the psychological threshold to a post- Cold War era. What we can call the formal Cold War, the stalemate between capitalism and communism, between the United States and the Soviet Union, came to an end with the disintegration of the latter. But there was no signif- icant change in the structural Cold War – in the institutions that had been built up to carry on the Cold War, particularly the intelligence services, and the mental frameworks and bodies of knowledge linked to that conflict.
These continued, in search of new applications: deterrence of new percep- tions of threat like Islamism; counter-insurgency warfare techniques to suppress popular movements disruptive of the global economy; combating terrorism and controlling the drug trade.
With the formal end of the Cold War, the aspirations of people at the lower levels of world power began to be more clearly articulated as affirma- tions of identity. However, these new burgeoning identities were contradicted by the triumphant universalism of the Cold War victor: by the ideology of economic globalization.
Western consciousness has been split between a dominant universalistic perspective that sees civilization as a Westerncivilization encompassing the whole world, and a pluralistic perspective that sees Western civilization (var- iously defined) as coexisting with and interacting with other civilizations. In the Western historical trajectory, the pluralistic conception is recurrent as counterpoint to major historical upheavals: the affirmation of national
cultures in response to the conquest and containment of the French Revolution, the fin de sièclepessimism of the late nineteenth century, and the loss of certainty in the exhaustion of the certainties of World War II and the Cold War in the late twentieth century. The universalistic notion of civiliza- tion has, however, remained a characteristic of Western consciousness and an intellectual obstacle to recognition of the ontological equality of other civi- lizations.
What is a civilization?
Archeologists who have studied ancient civilizations have defined them in material terms (e.g. Childe, 1942). The process of civilization is associated with urban life, state structures and technological innovation, from neolithic through copper to bronze eras, including invention of the wheel, ox-cart and sailing ship. Such material civilizations are recorded c.2500 BCEin the Nile Valley, Fertile Crescent, and the environs of Mohenjo Daro in the Indus valley. Gradually, these separated points became linked into a contiguous expanse of material civilization extending from the western Mediterranean through to the northern Indian subcontinent by about 100 BCE– and this does not include other sites of autonomous civilizations being found in China, Africa and Central and South America.
These material, technological, economically organized and class-structured entities were unified by religion. It is common nowadays to call civilizations by the names of religions – Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Confucian and so forth.
Religion enabled people encompassed within a civilization to develop a shared consciousness and symbols through which they could communicate meaningfully with one another. Myth, religion and language were all the same thing until language became secularized and rationalized. Those sets of symbols which made meaningful communication possible among the partic- ipants in a material civilization can be called sets of inter-subjective meanings.
The material world provided a common ground of experience; religion pro- vided a common ground of subjectivity. So a working definition of a civilization can be a fit or correspondence between material conditions of exis- tence and inter-subjective meanings.
The notion of a ‘fit’ does not imply a base–superstructure relationship in the sense that common material conditions automatically generate similar ideological superstructures in a ‘vulgar Marxist’ sense. One can attribute more autonomy to the realm of inter-subjectivity while at the same time positing a necessary correspondence, or what Max Weber called ‘elective affinity’ (Weber, 1948), between thought and the material conditions of exis- tence. The challenge of material conditions may be confronted in different ways in different forms of consciousness. Different sets of inter-subjective meanings may correspond to the same material conditions of existence. The requirement is that they make sense of these material conditions for the people concerned and make it possible for them to conceive their future and Conceptual guidelines for a plural world 161
to concert their activities towards certain ends. The material limits of the pos- sible are constraining, but there is always some scope for ethical choice.
The nature of inter-subjectivity has become particularly important in the current condition of civilizations. Ideologies born of the European Enlightenment and propagated throughout the world under European dom- inance, notably liberalism and Marxism, have been losing their hold in popular imagination and the field is open to competing world views.
Other terms have been used alongside ‘civilizations’ with analogous or related meanings: ‘empires’, ‘cultures’, even ‘societies’. Spengler (1939) used
‘culture’ to refer to the initial creative, poetic phases of a single organic process in which ‘civilization’ represented the mature, rationalized and declining phases. Toynbee (1946) used ‘society’ and ‘civilization’ inter- changeably; he was concerned with the ‘intelligible field of study’, i.e. the unit (or we could also say ‘social system’) which is adequate to explain what happens in its various parts, and he argued that the civilization is that unit.
‘Empire’ has both territorial and political implications; as referring to ancient empires it may connote the political structure of a civilization in a particular historical phase and thus represent a concept of unity compara- ble to religion in its inter-subjectivity (Eisenstadt, 1993). For Spengler, empire or imperialism is the last stage of decline in the organic life of a culture-civilization.
I would like to suggest another distinction between culture and civilization.
This is the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic (Piaget, 1965; Braudel, 1980). ‘Culture’ has been appropriated by structural- functional anthropology and takes the form of synchronic analysis concerned with how the composite of practices and norms in a given social system interact in maintaining the whole. Culture is an anthropologist’s word and civilization is a historian’s. ‘Civilization’, especially as relevant to the under- standing of global change today, can be thought of as the diachronic or historical dimension of culture. Of course, ‘culture’ is also commonly used in discussing relatively small human groups, for example a tribal community, or a segment of society, for example ‘culture of poverty’, or an ethnic or reli- gious group within a broader society. ‘Multicultural’ refers to a society composed of a number of such groups, all of which may belong to the same civilization.
The synchronic dimension is uppermost in all of these usages. It evokes the notion of homoeostasis as a natural restorer of equilibrium. The idea of equilibrium is alien to the notion of civilization. The focus is rather on ori- gins, encounters and transformations of civilizations. Stability and equilibrium give place to development and responses to internal and external challenges. Civilizations are the media through which people have come to organize themselves materially and mentally to cope with their material con- texts and to imagine a collective future.
Civilizations do not remain static. In the movement of history, there are recurrent struggles to reshape consciousness into a new fit with a changed
material context. In these contests, religious zeal confronts secularism and rationalized individualism confronts compassion and community. To begin an enquiry into the developments in civilizations and their impact on world political economy today, it is useful to set out a brief inventory of the prin- cipal arenas within which these struggles over the mental orientations of civilizations are taking place.
Another word has recently come to prominence in any discussion of per- spectives on the world. Post-modernism has given wide currency to the notion of ‘identity’ as the self-consciousness of collective subjects of history, especially those whose existence has been obscured in the dominant dis- courses. Feminism and post-colonial literature have given particular prominence to such identities. One might think of a civilization as a very large realm of identity, and often it seems to be so in the rhetoric of appeals to defend the principles of Western civilization, or of some other definition of civilization.
I prefer to leave the notion of identity to refer to self-consciousness. In so far as it may relate to civilization, it refers only to a conscious affirmation of belonging to a civilization. It does not refer to the ‘common sense’ or per- ceptions of ‘reality’ that characterize particular civilizations and which are to be found at a deeper level of consciousness – a level at which something that has been shaped by the historical development of a people comes to be under- stood by them as universal and natural. It is only through deep critical reflection that the formation of such ‘common sense’ through time and the perceptions of ‘reality’ that corresponds to it can be revealed.
Some implications flow from the definition of civilization as a fit between material conditions of existence and inter-subjective meanings:
1 Epistemology The emphasis on inter-subjectivity implies that there are different perspectives on the world, different understandings about the nature of the world, different perceptions of ‘reality’. Accordingly, the ‘real world’ is not a given, external to thought. ‘Reality’ is socially and historically con- structed as part of thought interacting with its material environment.
Different civilizational perspectives perceive different ‘realities’; and these different realities are constantly changing and developing. One inference from this is the need for reflexivity, for self-awareness of the social and his- torical conditioning of our own thought. Another inference is the need to be able to enter into the mental frameworks or inter-subjective meanings of others.4It leads to the post-modern dilemma: if there are no absolute foun- dations for social knowledge, where is truth?
2Theories of history Various theories of the development of civilizations may yield heuristic hypotheses, but must be rejected as laws of history.
Giambattista Vico (Chapter 3, pp. 46–7) posited that each civilization5had a distinct origin and a history independent of other civilizations. These separate histories, however, followed a common pattern, the ‘ideal eternal history’
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