One would have to be an actual active drive to spread their system across the earth.
That is an important point, in that by nature if its a world system, then it will have required aggression and expansion to be able to bring the entirety of the planet under its control, and naturally makes it so that it'll follow similar growth principles - infinite growth - that Europe has. The Europeans didn't reach the top by peaceful trade after all, they did it through aggression. Thus, logically, it'll require an expansionist effort, economically, militarily, and politically, and that'll naturally put it into some broad parallels as the West.
I must say, you really aren't bad at logic at all. Anyways, I'll comment mainly on East and Southeast Asia. Also, due to time limits I can't address all your topics.
This is really quite brilliant and in depth, thank you. I'm not actually sure about a lot of the topics, in that a lot of the Western universal institutions/thoughts are so deeply embedded in me its hard to point out which ones are truly universal, beyond the obvious ones like the nation-state; and as you point out, a lot of the ones which are "universalized" by Europe/the West, had strong precedents before hand.
The prevailing form of nationalism in China had a racialist tinge, a contrast between the Han Chinese against the barbarians. The Chinese were people, but the barbarians were animals; they could not coexist with the Chinese and had to be driven out. To quote Wang Fuzhi, a 17th-century historian,
It is not against benevolence for China to exterminate the barbarians; it is not against trust to deceive the barbarians; it is not against righteousness to cultivate and take their lands. Benevolence is to protect our people by exterminating theirs; trust is to deceive them and see them as bad; righteousness is to strengthen our people by taking their lands and resources.
But this is less European-style nationalism and more just racism. And more importantly, the most militarily dynamic Chinese dynasty, the Great Qing of the 18th century, was foreign in origin (not coincidentally, the Great Tang, the second most militarily powerful Chinese empire, was heavily influenced by foreigners). And such dynasties could not tolerate such racism. To quote the Yongzheng emperor, China is a multiethnic state that
can be ruled by "barbarians," Qing rule is beneficial to the Han Chinese, and Han Chinese people in much of China proper are actually descended from barbarians:
High Heaven has abandoned [having Han Chinese as emperors] because it disliked that there were no virtuous people in China proper. This is why it has made us outer foreigners rulers of China proper. [...]
What of the Miaos who have lived in China proper since before the Three Dynasties [the earliest dynasties in Chinese history]? The places they lived in, such as Chu and Xianyun, are what is now Hunan, Hubei, and Shanxi. Despite this, shall these people in the present day still be called barbarians? This should not be the case. [...]
Since our Qing dynasty became the rulers and entered into China proper to rule the empire, the Mongols have been annexed and all the tribes of the frontier have returned to the registers and maps. This is equivalent to China expanding her frontiers faraway. This is nothing less than a great blessing for the subject people of China. So what meaning is there to speak of the differences between Chinese and barbarian, between inner and outer?
So the lack of warfare between equals and, for China, the prevalence of conquest dynasties would suggest that European nationalism would find it difficult to arise in East Asia.
I believe that we hold a different view of nationalism emergence. I personally follow Benedict Anderson's nationalism theory holds that the development of nationalism took place with the three main factors of the rise of the vernacular language replacing previous hierarchical languages organized with a script language serving as the sacred language (such as Latin or Arabic), the imagining of homogenous, empty time which replaced the previous fusion of cosmology and history (always something I struggle on the most when trying to apply his work), and the decline of society being organized around high centers, monarchs ruling by divine power. This has limited ethnic and warfare aspects part of it. So, naturally, we're arriving at different results concerning the origin of nationalism.
I also don't think that even if there is a racialist tinge to the conception of Chineseness, that it would be necessarily a hurdling block to a nationalist conception. After all, in Europe, both England and Russia were governed by dynasties that were almost entirely or extensively German (The English haven't been governed by an "English" king since 1066) and yet in the end became English and Russian nationalizing elements respectively. In similar regards, exist the Spanish bourbons, the Greek Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, and Romanian Hohenzollerns. In Russia it took until the 1880s for the state to become truly "Russifying"; ironically some of the first to be suppressed were the formerly highly loyal Germans who formed the language-of-state in many provinces. At least within the European context, there wasn't necessarily a discord between their original ethnicity and adopting the nationalism of the people they ruled over, and I don't think that the foreign rulers to Chinese dichotomy necessarily would prevent the arrival of some form of nationalism.
The main source I have about ,
Rescuing History from the Nation (although just an excerpt of it); talks about that applying in the Chinese context;
Consider the history of Manchu Iidentity. The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) originated from a Manchu ethnic community which maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the dominant Han culture that it ruled. In the early stages of its rule, it actively sought to maintain Manchu distinctiveness through a variety of means, including a ban on intermarriage and Han migration to Manchuria and the fostering of different customs. In time, however, not only was the ban on migration and intermarriage ignored, but Manchu embracing of Chinese political institutions caused it to blur the distinction between it and the communities it ruled. More importantly, and unlike the Mongols, the Manchus recognized early the roots of politics in culture and rapidly became the patrons not only of elite culture, but also of popular Han gods like Guandi and Mazu. Thus by the eighteenth century, in terms of their social and cultural relations, the Manchu communities resident in the hundreds of garrisons outside of their homeland in the northeast were losing their literacy in Manchu as well as contract with their fold traditions and melding into the general Han populace (Crossley 1990b, 3, 30; Kuhn 1990, 68-70) "
Of course, it does make comments about that that might be overstating it and emphasize the racial aspects you had brought up (including the same Chinese thinker) such as;
"Just as significantly, during the Jin invasion of the twelfth century, segments of the literati completely abandoned the concentric, radiant concept of a universal empire for a circumscribed notion of the Han community and fatherland (guo) in which the Barbarians had no place. This ethnocentric notion of Chineseness was of course, not new. Chinese authors typically trace it as a quotation from the ancient classic, the Zuozhuan: '"the hearts of those who are not of our race must be different" (Li Guoqi 1970, 20; Dow, 1982, 353). Others (Langlois 1980, 362) find it still earlier in the concentric realms of inner and outer barbarians found in the Shangshu: pacific cultural activities were to prevail in the inner part , whose inhabitants were not characterized as ethnically different, with militancy towards the outer barbarians who appeared to be unassimilable. Trrauzettel believes that in the Song, this ethnocentrism brought together state and "the people." The state sought to cultivate the notion of loyalty to the fatherland in the peasant communities, from among whom arose resistance against the Jin in the name of Han Chinese culture and the Song dynasty (1975).
While the representation of the ethnic nation is most evident in the Song, it reappeared after the Manchu conquest in 1644. Its most explicit advocate in the late imperial period was Wang Fuzhi. Wang likened the differences between the Manchus and the Han to that between jade and snow, which are both white but different in nature, or, more ominously, between a man horse and a man of the same color, whose natures are obviously different (Li Guoqi 1970, 22). To be sure, it was the possession of civilization (wen) by the Han that gushed them from the barbarians, but it did not stop him from the view that "it is not inhumane to annihilate (the barbarians) . . . because faithfulness and righteousness are the ways of human intercourse and are not to be extended to alien kinds (i-lei [yilei]) (in Langlois 1980, 364). Although Wang may have espoused the most extreme view of his generation, several prominent scholars of the Ming-Qing transition era held onto the idea of the fundamental inassimilability of the yi (barbarian) Hau (Chinese) (see Onogawa [1970] and Wu Weiruo [1970])
Despite the undoubted success with which the Qing made themselves acceptable as the legitimate sons of heaven, they were unable to completely suppress the ethnocentric opposition to their rule either at a popular level or among the scholarly elite. The anti-Manchu writings of Wang fuzhi, Huang Zongxi, and Gu Yanwu during the early period of Qing rule, together with collections of stories of Manchu atrocities during the time, Mingji Yeshi (Unofficial History of the Late Ming),staged a reappearance around the middle of the nineteenth century (Wu Weiruo 1970, 263). Zhang Taiyan or instance, claims to have been nourished by a tradition both in his family and in wider Zhejiang society which held that the defense of the Han against the barbarians was as important as the righteousness of a ruler (Onagawa 1970, 216). Certainly Han excluvisim seems to have reached a height by the late eighteenth century, when the dominant Han majority confronted the non-Han minorities of China in greater numbers than ever before over competition for increasingly scarce resources (Naqin and Rawski 1987). Thus, it is hardly surprising to find that, from at least the time of resistance to the increased foreign presence in southern China after the Opium Wars through to the Boxer Rebellion of 1898 to 1900, there existed a general expectation, not only among the elite, but also among the populace, that the state would protect the culture and the people of the empire (Wakeman 1966; Esherick 1987). Although not all segments of the population were affected by it, this representation of political community was sufficiently rooted to make it a powerful mobilizing force in the nineteenth and twentieth century."
and
At the the same time, however, powerful counterdencies worked to shore up-or reconstruct- a Manchu identity. Most noteworthy was the effort of the Qianlong emperor (1736-1795) to introduce a classic narrative of discent of the Manchus - the Researches of Manchu Origins discussed by Crossley (1987) Researches traced the Descent of the Manchu clans to the first attestable peoples of the northeast, thereby demonstrating a"racial" distinctiveness which Crossley defines as "immutable identity based on ancestral descent" (1987, 762). Moreover, it celebrates the Manchus as inheritors of the imperial tradition of the region that was independent of (dissented from) the Han Chinese imperial tradition and most closely associated with the Jin empire of the twelfth century. To be sure, this narrative of discent played a part within the wider representation of power necessitated by the imperatives of ruling an empire that encompassed both Han Chinese and Central Asian polities (Crossley 1987; Kuhn 1990, 69). Confucian universalism was offset by racial exclusivism because,as Crossley remarks, every "racial" group - Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans, Han, and others- had their proper status according to their race. These races bore a relationship to the emperor set y the historical role of their ancestors in the creation and development of the state (Crossley 1987, 780). But this narrative, which endorsed a conception of "race" as a constitutive principle of community, was also motivated by the fears on the part of the emperor of total cultural extinction of the Manchus. Thus, the Qianlong emperor took it upon himself to champion the Manchu language and values and to punish those who forgot their roots (Kuhn 1990-66-68).
Manchu identity flowered tragically in the late nineteenth century, both in response to Qianlong's efforts and also as a reaction to a hHan ethnic exclusvism that became most evident during the years of the Taiping Rebellion. As early as 1840, in the days before the British attack on the lower Yangzi city of Zhenjiang during the Opium War, the tensions in the city led to hostility between the Manchu soldiers in the garrisons and the civilian Han populace. Countless Han were slaughtered by Manchu soldiers on the allegation that they were traitors. Elliot shows that the entire event was interpreted as ethnic conflict both by survivors and by local historians (Elliot 1990, 64). This simmering tension culminated the horrifying massacre of Manchu banner men and their families during the Taiping Rebellion and again in the Republican Revolution of 1911 (Crossley 1990b, 130, 196-97). manchus in the Republican era sustained their identity only by hiding it from public view and by quietly teaching the oral traditions to their children and grandchildren within their ones. Today, Manchu identity finds expression not only in their status as a nation minority in the PRC, but as Crossley observes, in such forms as the Manchu Association formed in Taipei in 1981 (Crossley 1990b, 216)
The Manchu search for a separate identity may be traced back to a narrative which privileged "race" as the definer of community. The tragedy of it was that this rhetoric forced a highly, if incompletely, assimilated people to turn their back on what had, after all, become their culture. And yet it would be wrong and untrue to the mode of analysis I have tried to establish here to posit an essentializing evolutionary tend in the growth of Manchu identity and the worsening of Han-Manchu relations. Corssley is sensitive to the ambivalences of Manchus towards this identity, and important leaders of the Confucian intelligentsia were committed to a cosmopolitanism within their nationalism that included the Manchus as Chinese. Perhaps least understood in this regard are the Boxer "rebels" and various secret society groups in the last decades of the nineteenth century, who actually sought to support the Qing court - as the representatives of Chinese culture - in the effort to expel the hated Westerner. As chapter 4 demonstrates, the presence of these tendencies in popular culture - which ran counter to Han-Manchu rivalries - contained seeds of an incipient counter narrative that was nipped in the bud by the republican revolutionaries.
In particular, one zone which I think would be a potential area for the emergence of nationalism in a world which was centered on China as the progenitor and nexus of a world civilization would be Chinese colonies. European colonies in the New World, which were settled with large populations of creoles who were of European descent and of the European culture of their home nation, still revolted and established their own nation-states. These weren't on ethnic, linguistic, or religious lines as are the common origins of nationalism, because the settlers who led the revolution were of the same ethnicity, same language, and same religion as their counterparts at home, but they still created nationalist states. Anderson's argument was that these are creole nationalisms created by the administrative structure of the region, which had administrative units that encompassed a certain region, where the administrators and elite could only reach the top of and no further. A colonial administrator in say, Mexico, could only reach the top of the Mexican administration, and hence it created an administrative unit, that with the influence of printing, was gradually linked together into a community
This is a view which has apparently been criticized by some Latin American scholars (although, that was sort of a comment in passing by the professor of the class I had taken where this was discussed, and he seemed critical of their counter-views), but regardless it still is something not based on ethnic warfare. I would argue that this seems very much to be an inevitability, in that no European state managed to keep hold of its colonial possessions, with the exception of very small islands or poorly populated and small continental possessions like French Guiana. Therefor, since China seems likely to develop colonies of some persuasion if it is the agent of History, and it seems to me likely that these will develop in time nationalism, which seem like regardless of any developments elsewhere, it will spread the idea of nationalism.
However, I'll admit not to be an expert on anything to do with East Asia (well: that can be applied to a lot of things; I enjoy dabbling in a range of subjects but I lack the depth on any single subject that I really should have), and different structures rather than just the nation-state model are a possibility, and China's model already incorporates elements of the nation-state without necessarily being one; this is admittedly taking from Ernest Gellner's nations and nationalisms rather than from Benedict Anderson (Gellner emphasized the various social classes even more than Anderson, Anderson being principally concerned with print language), but China's co-incidence of the bureaucratic elite with the state in contrast to Europe and the Muslim world gave it a nationalist element that was Gellner claimed was absent elsewhere. Furthermore you've explained that they had a much higher literacy rate than I had previously thought was the case, which further gives credence to them exhibiting heavy nationalistic features already, even if the question of how close this nationalism is to the European model is up for question. I do think that even if domestic nationalism occurs similarly, it seems to me probable that the relations between states are going to occur in a completely different state complex; European derived nation-states are built on the principles of equality between state to state in theory, while East Asia has no reason to develop such a Westphalian model.
Southeast Asia is an entirely different story. While not as frequent as in Europe, the great wars that played out in the region throughout its history did create a politicized ethnicity, or proto-nationalism, akin to that in pre-Revolutionary Europe. If Southeast Asia somehow, somehow, became the dominant area of the world, nationalism would probably be expected. Just a few examples of ethnicity being politicized:
- Burma: The Great Royal Chronicle of U Kala, written in 1711, begins with an origin myth for his Burman people and follows the history of that people up to the present day. Essentially this is a history centered on the Burmans as a people, not a history centered on Buddhism, cities, or royal personnages. Historians later in the century put words like Myanmar - Burma - boldly on its title, while other historians compare Burma favorably to Sri Lanka and claim that Burmese Buddhism is the most pure sect of the religion, legitimizing Burma's conquests. During the wars of Burmese reunification in the mid-18th century, Burmese troops killed Mon rebels indiscriminately but spared Burmans while bragging that one Burman could kill ten Mons. Burmans supporting the Mons are called traitors to Myanmar lumyo, "the Burman people." And while Europeans aren't the most reliable sources, we still shouldn't neglect the British account of a Burmese prince boasting about his people (quoted in A Personal Narrative of Two Years' Imprisonment in Burma, page 103):
"You [the British] know nothing," he would say, "about the bravery of our people in war. We have never yet found any nation to withstand us. They say your soldiers, when they fight, march up exposing their whole bodies. They use music, to let us know when they are coming, They do not know our skill and cunning. They will all be killed if they attack us in this way."
- Thailand: Thai proto-nationalism was weaker, mostly because a smaller percentage of the kingdom's population was Thai compared to the percentage of Burmese in Burma. But we do note a contrast between the "peaceful" Buddhist Thai and the "sinful" Burmese "who feel no shame for all the sins they have committed," just as the Burmese contrast their Buddhism with the heresies of the Thai. Again, Europeans aren't the best sources, but as external sources they are valuable in ways that Southeast Asian sources aren't, since they note things the Asians would have seen as very normal. On Thailand, a Jesuit notes in the 1680s: "They are proud and fancy that no other nation can be compared with them, and that their laws, customs, and learning are better than anywhere else on earth." In 1822 a British traveler finds the "vanity" of the Thai amusing:
The lowest [Thai] peasant considers himself superior to the proudest and most elevated subject of any other country. They speak openly of themselves and their country as models of perfection; and the dress, manners, customs, features, and gait of strangers, are to them objects of ridicule. It is difficult to account for so great an excess of weakness and delusion, but no doubt the general causes are [...] the dominion and superiority which they have immemorially [sic] exercised over the barbarous and inferior tribes which immediately surround them. From whatever cause it arises, there can be no question but that the Siamese, ignorant as they are in arms and arts,- without individual or national superiority,- half naked and enslaved, are yet the vainest people in the East.
- (Thailand continued) But IMO the most pungent marker of how important ethnicity had become in Thailand was during a rebellion by a Lao king in the 1820s. The question the Lao rebels asked to determine who would live and die was simple: "[Are you] Thai or Lao?"
- Vietnam: While Vietnam had probably the weakest strain of proto-nationalism in mainland Southeast Asia, probably due to geography. Public opinion in the north seems to have been far from eager about the Vietnamese wars in the south against the Thai, for example. But it still was present, especially in assimilation efforts. Emperor Minh-Mang says "the barbarians [in Cambodia] have become my children now, and you should help them, and teach them our customs [...] As for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese [...] If there is any out-dated or barbarous customs that can be simplified, or repressed, then do so." However, I'd note that this looks very similar to Qing practice of assimilating southwestern peoples and (the barbarian-Vietnamese dichotomy especially) rooted more in Confucianism than proto-nationalism. For example, the Burmese were contemptuous of the Mons, who were renowned for their Buddhist faith, but the Vietnamese were not contemptuous of the Chinese. Nevertheless, the same 1822 Briton notes:
Like the Siamese, they are nationally very vain, and consider themselves the first people in the world, being hardly disposed to yield the palm even to the Chinese – the only strangers whom they are disposed to consider respectable. They consider the [Cambodians] [...] as barbarians, and scarcely think the Siamese much better.
- Java: In Java, proto-nationalism was also based on the hallmarks of modern nationalism - Islam, the Javanese language, and the empire of Majapahit, although I know too little about it. But for a few examples mainly from the Dipanagara rebellion of the 1820s against the Dutch, the rebel leader Dipanagara gave privilege to Dutch prisoners who wore Javanese dress, converted to Islam, and learned High Javanese and discouraged people from speaking Malay; to him, Malay was the "language of chickens which no ruler in Java wished to hear."
In particular, while I don't dismiss ethnic characterizations as being part of the process of proto-nationalism (proto-nationalism is sort of an awkward concept, but you're right in that it was there, just it feels to me uneasy to use it in such regards when nationalism is claimed radical break with previous organizations of society; just the Asian case doesn't match up to that since there are some clear precedents before hand), I think that the link can be pushed too far. Characterizations of other peoples and places as inferior have existed since time immemorial, and yet the nation-state as we know it today is one that's emerged relatively recently.
But that applies only to some of the cases you're presenting, principally the Burmese characterizations of foreigners and other people (which I'm not arguing against as a whole, but a section of the argument relating to Burmese nationalism), and some of the others look very convincing as examples of a version of nationalism in action. I am very impressed by the Javanese and language assimilation.
Oh, definitely. First, the Chinese and Korean states already had that much earlier than Europe. I quote R. Bin Wong,
China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience.
We think it a 'modern' trait for states to push education and to attempt more generally to shape the beliefs of the people. European states began these efforts in the nineteenth century as they moved, on the model of France, to mobilize their populations around sentiments of national identity. Though Chinese efforts at education and moral training between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries did not lead to a nineteenth-century European-style "nationalism," they do represent efforts by a state to influence belief and behavior patterns of the general population well before such activities were imagined, let alone pursued, in Europe. [...] There is no early modern European government equivalent to the late imperial Chinese state's efforts at dictating moral and intellectual orthodoxy, nor were such efforts particularly important to Europe's state-making agenda, as they were in China. Early modern European states did not share the Chinese state's view that shaping society's moral sensibilities was basic to the logic of rule. [Wong then discusses the Inquisition in a citation and remarks that "without the Church the movement cannot even be imagined," separating the Church-driven enforcement of moral orthodoxy from state-driven ones.] From a Chinese perspective, the lack of concern for education and moral indoctrination in Europe constitutes a basic limitation on European rule, no less important than the absence of representative political institutions in China.
In Southeast Asia, Burma is by far the best example, although Thailand's adult male literacy rate was also between 30% and over 50%. The expansion of state-backed universal monastic education in the Early Modern era meant that male literacy in the underdeveloped kingdom was probably the highest in Asia by 1800, most likely beating even France, as villagers learned to write as lay students, novices, and monks. Even poor villagers could write commercial contracts, while the first British census for Upper Burma in 1892 gave an adult (over 25 years of age) male literacy rate of 62.5%. Again, to quote Europeans because I unfortunately cannot read Burmese, the first is Niccolao Manucci (1639-1717) and the second is a British officer:
"It is a kingdom governed by the pen, for not a single person can go from one village into another without a paper or writing, whereby the government is made most easy."
"I have not seen a single village on my way down without these monasteries, and reading and writing are rendered so common by the universal custom of founding their village schools, that men following the most menial offices can both read and write."
Universal education is just too useful for everyone.
Wow, that's very impressive. Everybody knows about the Chinese imperial bureaucracy and its examinations of course, but I never realized that the educational system extended as far and was as advanced. To an extent, I did know that China had a lot more in the way of institutional reach than other states; I had taken a class on Nationalism at the university I attend and it had painted a striking picture of China's resiliency through the bureaucratic system and its degree of horizontal organization (as laid out in the after mentioned excerpts of Prasenjit Duara's book), but I the way it was presented when I had read about it was one which minimized the written aspects of such affairs, emphasizing instead religious and community linkages that served to tie together China without the written aspects. I had always assumed that Chinese (and other East Asian states) had very low literacy rates before the 20th century, and that puts them into a completely different character. It also further heightens nationalistic elements; the theory of nationalism I subscribe to is one which holds nationalism to emerge from mass literacy, and since they already had that, it makes the elements of proto-nationalism you've outlined even more convincing.
One point of difference I might be curious about however, is the way in which such mass literacy was utilized? In the European case, it was the influence of newspapers and novels that helped to produce much of the rise of nationalism. I was under the impression that
The market economy existed in full force in China. To quote William T. Rowe in
China's Last Empire: The Great Qing,
Although China was long thought of in the West as the very model of an agrarian society, by the mid-Qing era it was possibly the most commercialized country in the world. Chinese elites who claimed to live the idealized gentleman-farmer life of “ploughing and reading” more often than not were subsidized by a family fortune made from trade. And Western self-professed “pioneers of commerce” who came to China in the nineteenth century thinking they were teaching the natives the virtues of exchange were simply deluding themselves. Of course, the total amount of the empire’s commerce increased with the rising volume of overseas trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and even more with Western mercantile penetration of inland cities following the Opium Wars. But this commerce never remotely approached the scale of the Qing empire’s own vast and thriving domestic trade.
And considering how it arose not only in China and Europe but in Tokugawa Japan at the same time that portfolio capitalists swaggered in the streets of Indian cities, I would say that the emergence of a market economy is possible in most cultural climates. And to be a hegemonic power in the vein of Europe (and not, say, the Mongols) you need a strong economic basis. So this, I would argue, is a universality.
That's even more sophisticated than I had thought, and it opens up some additional areas for research;
A History of Modern India 1480-1950 had made comments about the sophisticated nature of Indian commercial interactions, and I had heard some people reference to the Chinese having a variant of the joint-stock company, but some of the specific aspects such as Indian portfolio investors were things which I wasn't aware of previously, and you paint a picture of the region that is even more sophisticated than I had previously believed. It certainly wasn't the first time the Europeans erroneously and for political reasons viewed native systems as lacking or deficient. In particular, it rather mitigates against a Weberian argument that the "East" was culturally unsuited for capitalism.[/quote]
I feel like you're bundling too many disparate threads into one ball there, and we should remember how much struggle there has been within the "West" over some of those notions. The Soviet Union only fell 25 years ago after all, and it's possible(we could argue over whether it's plausible) that they could have dominated the world(or at least the Old World) under the right circumstances- would we then speak of "the West" imposing communism upon Asia and Africa? Communism as an ideology and economic model is much more distinctly Western in it's origins then the mixed market economy ever was(we might say that Smithian/liberal/libertarian notions of a free market are of a distinctly Western origin, but they were never actually implemented in the West or anywhere else).
The point I'm making is that any country that's sufficiently dominant will impact other countries, but we shouldn't be too fatalistic about asserting that the ways in which they
were impacted were the only ways in which they
could have been impacted. Consider the ways in which Germany today is influencing the rest of Europe through it's privileged position to the ways in which a victorious Nazi Germany would have influenced Europe.[/quote]
I disagree, in that while there have been challengers - the Soviet Union and the Germans being the most obviously radically different ones - even these still operated within certain Western notions. The Soviets were still a nation-state after all, and Marxism as you point out was Western, and it followed the same process of being spread to and even imposed on other areas of the world. It also doesn't mitigate against what I'm saying; the European colonial empires spread universalities of civilization being a linear model around the world, but this is rejected by the Western world today, so universal values can change, much less the ideology of the challenging powers. There could be a thread about what sort of alternate values could have emerged in the West, but the current dominant one has been the dominant one for long enough, and even its competitors still used enough of its institutions, that I feel that we can call there as being a certain "European/Western model", and that the Soviets and the Germans were ephemeral challengers in our world. That there were challengers, challengers from within, to hegemony that I've outlined as existing, doesn't remove its existence. The same could happen if there was an alternate originator of a world hegemony, without undermining the foundation; perhaps if it is India that develops a model predicated upon non-sovereign states paying allegiance to the Mughal emperor and spreads this to the world, an alternate progenitor of the nation-state could exist, without undermining the hegemony.
A separate thread would be interesting for what could be the alternate universalities that could emerge from the West itself, and whether challengers could succeed in fracturing a supposed "Western" unified body, I think that my precepts are unified enough and the focus still concentrated enough, that one thread is acceptable for what might be differences of the world-system in a non-Western progenitor.
Then consider that, just as different European/Western countries influenced the world in radically different ways at different times, in a hypothetical world where "China" or "India" is the dominant hegemon there are surely multiple different ways in which their dominance could express itself, ways no less radically different the differences between Nazism, Communism and liberal democracy.
Certainly all of the "Western" nations have influenced the world in various ways, but I do not think it especially unfair to say that they've settled on a certain model in the end with relative homogeneity. This model is one that's been the hegemony for a long time; the Empires of 1914 might have had different ideas about rights for women, racialism, even democracy and race and class, but they're still our clear predecessors. No European state spread around the world the idea that states didn't exist, that its economic model that it viewed as Western wasn't to be imposed, that the linear model of civilization wasn't the one in vogue (well, in the 19th century that is, earlier of course different ideology), and even earlier they were still operating in some similar models. I certainly don't want to overgeneralize, because there is a whole lot of difference between various European countries, but the very fact that we're calling them countries as a whole says a lot about what the dominant world view is; there's no competition (serious) which is claiming that we should be anarchists, and even the Communists with the withering away of the state, ultimately defaulted to the same nation-state model.
I should also emphasize of course that I don't intend to overstate that there is a clear-cut difference between the East and the West that is unbridgeable, and was done by the likes of Kipling; naturally, there are a lot of similarities between the two, and to construct two monolithic blocks in opposition is foolish. But we ultimately need some sort of broad concept to organize such structures, and I think that the East/West paradigm is fitting in this instance. My original purpose with the thread wasn't go go into an East/West paradigm either; maybe some really creative person would suggest an Aztec or Incan based world hegemony!
The question becomes: are there ways in which the influences of "Nazism, Communism, American-style liberal democracy and various others "models" that have existed or could have existed in the West" are more similar to each other then any of them would have been to various ways in which Chinese or Indian influence could have expressed itself? That is to say we should think in three categories:
1) Universalistic trends: Mass education can probably be put in that category. Even ISIS and corporate charter cities see it as a given- free labour is more useful when cultivated, and likely to turn itself towards dangerous ends if useless and thus not used. The only exception to this is slavery, where you have private cultivation of labour's value rather then public cultivation, but even the slavery-era South had mass education for it's white masses.
2) Coincidental trends: Nazis promoting racism, Soviets promoting communism, Anglosphere liberals promoting deregulated capitalism(?), hypothetical Chinese/Indian/Ottoman equivalents.
3) Civilisation-inherent trends(ie. ways in which the influence of Nazis, Soviets and Americans are likely to be in alignment): I'm having a hard time with this one. Cuisine? Chocolate is absurdly popular around the world when you consider that most non-Europeans are lactose intolerant. Popularization of certain taboos? Perhaps a world more influenced by Hindu Indians would likely be much more sympathetic to vegetarianism? And perhaps people in such a world would assume that the same would have been true if any other civilisation had dominated, on Steven Pinker-esque grounds that expanding the scope of our empathy is inevitable?[/QUOTE]
I appreciate the way that you organize your points, I have a list structure I'll use for trying to lay out some that I believe are examples of Western hegemony points, that might find alternates or opposites in a different world.
- Nation state (the most obvious one, and my favorite)
- Mass education (as pointed out by
My Daichingtala, it existed elsewhere before Europe arrived, but its still something which has been universalized)
- Rationalized bureaucracies (there are still cases of nepotism and corruption everywhere, but technically the rationalized bureaucratic system is the standard.
- Democracy (exceptions of course, but still the standard)
- Equality of races and of sexes (perhaps a recent invention for the Western hegemony and a move from previous models, but the current view)
- Market economy (ditto reasoning behind mass-education
- Secular state (as always exceptions, but the state has largely lost its religious connotations that it previously had)
- Human rights (One of the most obviously "Universal" aspects - Universal declaration of Human Rights rather makes it clear - and one notably not free from criticism)
- Class (I don't actually know as much of how this is viewed in other countries, but our view of class has been heavily influenced by Marx)
- "Western" science (I'm sure there were alternate nodes with similar thoughts, but the Western mode of science is the universally dominant one)
- Professionalized and national militaries (Few states with the capability to oppose, allow sub-national militias that aren't controlled by them, or a feudal mode of organization)
- Intellectual property (pretty standard across the globe, falling into the market economy)
- Rational and homogenous history and time (The sacred and cosmological aspects which were once part and parcel of history have been removed, replaced with a secular history that universally encompasses everyone; this seems to be now pretty universal across the globe relating to various region's understanding of history)
- State languages (the rise of the vernacular driving out previous high languages; one reason why I say "state" instead of "national" languages, is that the process of this emergence started in the 14th and 16th century in England and France, before there was a "national" - on the same hand, it seems that for India at least, its managed to avoid language based nationalism, although that might be due to being able to have English which exists as a high language, and former African colonies follow the same logic. So, this one might not be truly universal, even if the languages in question have changed)
-Development economics; more controversial, but we have our Washington Consensus, plus various development economic schools otherwise, for developing backwards states; in an alternate world, presumably they might have some different suggestions for how to build up poor regions.
- I'm sure there have been a host of philosophical concepts that have been spread, but I am not knowledgable about that area.
- UNESCO; sort of similar to the history, but we have a certain view of how we should preserve the past.
- Various environmental thoughts; generally there is an accord on protecting the environment, which is done in a certain manner that is Western, generally scientific as opposed to say, mystical or traditional.
- Individualism/autonomy; of course, not entirely nonexistent in other traditions, but the West generally prides itself on its individuality as compared to more "collective" societies.
- "Modernity" and its juxtaposition against the past - Western civilization generally holds there to be a reasonably clean break between the "Modern age", and the "Past" - and much of this stemming from Enlightenment Europe, where there was the then-present counterposed against the "Classical era", producing a juxtaposition between the two, and the starting to the separation of cosmology and history into homogenous time, at least according to Benedict Anderson.. There might not be such a clean break under another civilization.
- NGOs (non-governmental organizations) - a vital part of Western organization organization of the world-system; perhaps an alternate world system could find a different way to organize it.
Various universal and world institutions
United Nations (most obvious)
Olympics (Western notions of sport have become pretty universal I would say; if we're talking about Nazi/Soviet challengers, I'd say they fell (roughly) into the same mold.
World Trade Organization (representing a certain view of trade that has been universalized)
International criminal court (Western standards of justice and law are universalized)
International Monetary Fund (international organization of the economy)
World Health Organization (certain promotion of a medical vision)
Harder to come up with than I would have thought…
There are some probably universal things that we could say are purely "cultural", that we all do, but they're harder to think of and are further difficult to assign to being "Western", and can be more difficult and sensitive to discuss. There's also the question of whether we even can relegate culture to a separate category, which is raised by Wallerstein, who would hold culture to be indistinguishable from politics (I always get a mildly vivid flashback to a presentation I did in a class I took where I unnaturally separated the two because I didn't practice my presentation enough and started talking on about it; I clarified in the questions afterwards, but it was so amateurish). Is listening to "pop music", universal? Maybe, but is it "Western"? Watching movies? Pornography? Browsing the internet? One thing that I should say as a reiteration is that I think its entirely possible for something to not be used by the even the majority of the world's population, but still to be "universal" in that its the established baseline and what is the value propagated by a hegemony; there are billions of people in undemocratic regime, but democracy is still very much a universally promoted value and one that enjoys the support of the Western system.
