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THE ABDUCTION OF
MODERNITY
Part 6a: Imperialism as
modernity
By Henry C K Liu
Part 1: The race toward
barbarism
Part 2: That old time religion
Part 3: Rule of law vs Confucianism
Part 4: Taoism and modernity
Part 5: The Enlightenment and modernity
Imperialism is the extension of rule
or dominance by one people over another. Ancient
imperialism reached its climax under the Roman Empire,
which collapsed in the West after two centuries of
Pax Romana, and withered away finally in the East
in the late Middle Ages with the collapse of the
Byzantine Empire in 1453. The fall of Constantinople in
1453 to the Ottoman Sultan Mohammad II is viewed by some
historians as the beginning of the modern age.
Thereafter, imperialism subsided. Subsequently, the Holy
Roman Empire and Ottoman Dominion emerged as
confederations of princely states of high degrees of
autonomy rather than imposed imperial rule.
A
new imperialism was reborn in the West with the rise of
commercial capitalism in the 17th century in which
external trade became indispensable to the growth of
domestic economies. Under commercial capitalism, capital
was primarily employed to finance inventory and
logistics, not manufacturing. Commercial capitalism was
a socio-economic system characterized by private
ownership of the means of distribution, not necessarily
of production, operating for private profit through the
institutions of private bank credit and linked distant
markets. The rise of industrial capitalism dated from
the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century with the
private ownership of the means of production and imposed
distant markets. Nineteen-century imperialism was an
extension of industrial capitalism. Neo-imperialism of
the post-Cold War era is an extension of finance
capitalism, in which the global manipulation of finance
dominates all else. Though the specific characters of
capitalism have changed over the ages, the fundamental
essence of capitalism is not a product of modernity.
Neither is imperialism, the political extension of
capitalism.
Protestantism, particularly
Calvinism, provided the spiritual foundation for the
spread of industrial capitalism. Calvinism, being
critical of human nature, believes that God's grace is
bestowed on only a few elected godly individuals as
predestination. A believer can instill in his/her own
consciousness an awareness of being among the
pre-selected saved, as God's chosen few, if throughout
all trials and temptations, he/she persists in a saintly
life. Predestination thus becomes a challenge to exert
unrelenting human effort with burning religious
conviction and to undertake a mission to do the battle
of God, rejecting pessimism and resignation.
Predestination has its parallel in Chinese
Buddhism. Looking for a politically correct Buddhist
theologian, Li Shimin, a Taoist and the Genesis Emperor
(Taizong) of the Tang Dynasty, found him in the person
of Xuanzang (605-661), an eminent pilgrim seng
(Buddhist monk). With imperial sponsorship, Xuanzang
would in his life be the prodigious translator of
Yogacara-bhumi, a treatise of the Yogacara school
of Indian Mahayana Buddhism (Dasheng, meaning "major
vehicle"), and establish a new denomination that would
call itself the Faxiang sect (Methodist Divination).
Compared with the merciful theology of universal
salvation in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism set by the widely
recognized Tiantai sect (Heaven Platform), the Faxiang
sect founded by Xuanzang is an anomaly in the
development of Buddhist thought in China. After its
initial flowering, it faded quickly after the withdrawal
of imperial sponsorship, when subsequent sovereigns
supported their own separate religious sects.
Xuanzang, brought up as an ecclesiastic
apprentice since birth, was ordained as a seng at
an early age in Chengdu in the western province of
Sichuan. Chengdu is 1,200 kilometers east of Lhasa in
Xizang (Tibet), which in turn is separated by the
impassable Himalayas from Xiyu (Western District, a term
Tang geographers used to include the northern regions of
India, referred to as Tianshu). Like all devout and
zealous sengs of his day, Xuanzang in his youth
longed for an opportunity to go to Xiyu, birthplace of
Buddhism, to seek true scripture as well as for personal
enlightenment. Northern India was considered the holy
land of Buddhism, known by Buddhists in Tang China as
Bei Tianshu. Bei Tianshu was part of Xiyu, a general
term for all regions south and west of Dunhuang, a
famous site of Buddhist grotto temples in the
northwestern province of Kansu, on the far western
border of the Tang Empire where the southern branch of
the Silk Route toward India began.
India was
known as Shendu in China during the Han Dynasty (206
BC-AD 220), possibly a Chinese translation of the
Sanskrit word Hindu. It was also known as Land of
Poluomen, derived from the Sanskrit word Brahman.
Modern Chinese refers to India as Yindu, a modification
of Hindu. During the Tang time (618-907) it was
referred to as Tianshu, a land with five separate
independent kingdoms.
Young Xuanzang applied for
official permission to make a pilgrimage, as required by
law. But permission was denied as part of a general
Taoist Tang imperial policy that discouraged further
Buddhist pilgrimage. Undaunted, Xuanzang went
surreptitiously on his own accord. In his extensive
pilgrimage, Xuanzang was aided by many pious local
Buddhist lords and officials who passively opposed
Taoist imperial anti-Buddhist policies, paying only lip
service to the thin authority of the Tang court in
religious matters.
In the Tang time, the journey
from China to Xiyu was circuitous and difficult, having
to cross the Tarim Basin desert, passing Samarkand in
Turkistan and Kabul in Afghanistan, and through Kashmir
to reach northern India. Direct access through Xizang
(Tibet) was physically hazardous because of the
forbidding height of the Himalaya mountain ranges that
separate China and India. It was also politically
treacherous because of the relentless hostility of the
Tufans (Tibetans), one of several branches of the
Western Rong Barbarians known as Xiqiang.
Nevertheless, Xuanzang managed to arrive in
northern India with a small entourage of faithful
servants who were social outcasts back home. He traveled
to the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent via the
east coast and returned north via the west coast. In
India, Xuanzang spent almost 15 years studying, five of
which at Nalanda, an important center of Buddhism in
northeastern India, with the brilliant but highly
unorthodox elder, Silabhadra. A relatively minor figure
in the Yogacara school of Indian Mahayana Buddhism
(Dasheng), Silabhadra was not particularly known for
having represented faithfully the teachings of
Vasubandhu, the recognized authoritative Yogacara
philosopher.
The most crucial aspect of
Silabhadra's heretical offshoot theology is the
assertion that only some select persons would reach
eventual enlightenment, and, in fact, there is a whole
category of people for whom attainment to Buddhahood is
impossible. Furthermore, through no fault of their own,
these unfortunate souls inherently lack untainted seeds,
and hence are eternally excluded from salvation. The
best that such pathetic souls in this unfortunate
category of deficient people could hope for would be
continuing cycles of ameliorative rebirth, which
fortunately could still be achieved through the
accumulation of spiritual merits.
This
unorthodox and unmerciful idea of predestination was
brought back to China by Xuanzang in the 7th century.
Unlike Calvinism in the West, Xuanzang's Faxiang sect
did not flourish in China. Taoists challenge Buddhist
precepts with obvious demographic evidence on the
discrepancy between the spread of Buddhism and the
persistent increase of misery in the world's growing
population. Buddhism, of course, has never proposed any
program for elimination of secular misery. It merely
promises to make such misery less painful spiritually.
To the enlightened Buddhist, both extreme wealth and
extreme poverty are curses.
Gunnar Myrdal
(1898-1984), a Swedish sociologist-economist born 12
centuries after Xuanzang, in his 1944 definitive study
The American Dilemma, for which he received the
1974 Nobel Prize for Economics, having declared the
"Negro" problem in the United States to be inextricably
entwined with the democratic functioning of American
society, went on to produce a 1976 study of Southeast
Asia, The Asian Dilemma. In it, he identified
Buddhist acceptance of suffering as the prime cause for
economic underdevelopment in the region. Myrdal's
conclusion appears valid superficially, given the
coincident of indisputable existence of conditions of
poverty in the region at the time of his study and the
pervasive influence of Buddhism in Southeast Asian
culture, until the question is asked as to why, whereas
Buddhism has prevailed in Southeast Asia for more than a
millennium, pervasive poverty in the region would only
make its appearance after the arrival of Western
imperialism in the 19th century. It could be that Myrdal
had been influenced in his convenient conclusion by his
eagerness to deflect responsibility for the sorry state
of affairs in the region from the legacy of Western
imperialism.
In contrast to Lutherans, who
glorify the state as the sole legitimate expeditor of
revolutionary ideology, Calvinists reject the
subordination of church to state and embrace the holy
mission to Christianize the state. Calvinism rejects
democracy with its elitist outlook. While the ideas of
Calvinism were central to the rise of capitalism, these
ideas fostered in early capitalism a mission to create a
religious community that celebrated ascetic living for
all, devoid of greed and the exploitative elements that
permeate modern capitalism. Calvinists were called
Puritans first in England and later in America.
The economic dimensions of Protestantism -
acquisitiveness, aggressiveness, competitiveness and
capitalistic exploitation - legitimized by religious
righteousness, dismantled the self-restraint on
individualism and greed that early Christianity tried to
foster and medieval Christianity tried to
institutionalize. Protestantism plunged the world into
centuries of disharmony, war and conflict in the name of
modernity.
The Arabs, a people generally defined
by a common Arabic language, awakened with the new faith
of Islam by Mohammed (died 632), took control of Syria,
Mesopotamia, Persia and Egypt in 640, took Roman Africa
in 700 and reached Spain in 711, where they overthrew
the Germanic kingdom set up by the West Goths. The Arab
realm then stood as the advanced third component of a
triangulated non-Asian world culture of Byzantines,
Arabs and the collapsed Roman West. The latter had been
overran by uncouth Germanic tribes who had yet to
develop written languages and who settled disputes with
trials by battle, known as ordeals. Europe was in what
historians call the Dark Ages. In the aftermath of the
fall of the Western Roman Empire, with Pax Romana
in ruins, while the Eastern Roman emperors, ruling
from Constantinople, kept a dim light of Roman
civilization burning, in the West that light flickered
and went out except in the network of fortified
monasteries that rejected the barbaric society at large.
From 800 to 1500, during the European Dark Ages,
significant advances in philosophy, literature and
poetry and discoveries in mathematics, medicine,
astronomy and science were made by scholars in the Arab
world. During this period of seven centuries, almost all
scientific texts were written in Arabic, and the
discoveries of Arab thinkers of this period laid the
very foundations from which both Scholasticism and the
Renaissance would emerge. Advances in mathematics as
well as scientific methods of detailed and systematic
observation of nature in this period by Arabs
contributed to the later intellectual growth that
propelled the Western world through the Industrial and
Scientific revolutions. In learning, the Arabs preserved
Greek civilization neglected by the Western barbarians.
William Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar, has Casca
reporting to Brutus on Cicero, who spoke in Greek:
"Those that understood him smiled at one another and
shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek
to me." The year before (1600), another Elizabethan
playwright, Thomas Dekker, wrote: "I'll be sworn he
knows not so much as one character of the tongue. Why,
then it's Greek to him." The phrase came from a medieval
Latin proverb, "Graecum est; non potest legi" (It
is Greek; it cannot be read). The Spanish version of
this proverb is "hablar en griego", which is
commonly said to be the origin of the word
gringo, one who is literally accused of speaking
Greek, and hence being unintelligible.
The Arabs
went beyond what the ancient Greeks had achieved. They
invented Arabic numerals, the concept of zero (Arabic
sifr), and algebra (al-jebr-jabara), on
which modern mathematics and science flowered. Roman
numerals, in their cumbersome form, would have never led
to the development of advanced mathematics. Some other
English words of Arabic origin are "admiral"
(amir-al-bahr), "adobe" (al-toba),
"alchemy" (al-kimia), "alcohol" (al-kohl),
"algorithm" (al-Khowarazmi), "alkali"
(al-qaliy), "almanac" (Andalucian Arabic
al-manakh), "amber" ('anbar), "antimony"
(al-ithmid), "apricot" (al-burquq),
"arsenal" (dar assina'ah), "artichoke"
(al-kharshuf), "assassin" (h'ashshashin),
"azure" (al-lazward), "caliber"
(qalib), "checkmate" (shah mat), cipher
(sifr), "cork" (qurq), "cotton"
(qutn), "crimson" (qirmazi), "elixir"
(al-iksir), "jar" (jarrah), "jasmine"
(yasmin), "lilac" (lilak), "lemon"
(laymun), "lime" (limah), "lute"
(al-'ud), "magazine" (makhazin), "mask"
(maskhara), "mattress" (matrah), "mohair"
(mukhayyar), "monsoon" (mausim), "nadir"
(nadir), "orange" (naranj), "safari"
(safariy), "saffron" (za'faran), "sofa"
(suffah), "sugar" (sukkar), "syrup"
(sharab), "tariff" (tarif), "tarragon"
(tarkhun), and "zenith" (samt). Yet for
all its cultural achievements, the Arabs, not unlike the
Germans until the 19th century, were prevented by their
tribal culture from developing a unified central
political entity.
By the mid-16th century, the
Holy Roman Empire under the Hapsburgs took on the
characteristics of a universal monarchy in parallel to
the Roman Church's claim of catholic religion. France, a
Catholic nation in good standing, to contain the
Hapsburgs' expanding control of Spain, the Netherlands,
Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece, allied itself with
the rebelling Protestant German states and even the
"infidel" Ottoman Empire against the Hapsburg Holy Roman
emperors.
The Ottomans developed one of the
greatest and most influential civilizations in history.
Their moment of glory in the 16th century represented
one of the heights of human creativity, optimism and
artistic achievement, weaving the diverse strands of
several cultures, from Greek to Romanesque to Arabic to
Anatolian, into an Ottoman civilization under the
spiritual unity of Islam. Their system of rule, a form
of dominion of diverse ethnicities, religions and
cultures, misnamed "empire" by the West, was the largest
and most influential of the Muslim world, and their
culture and military expansion crossed over into Europe.
There was no wholesale compulsory conversion of
Christians or Jews into Muslims. Christians under
Ottoman rule fared better than Muslims did under
Christendom, or Moors in Spain, or Protestants in France
or Catholics in England and Ireland. The Ottoman
Dominion, which by 1650 extended from the Hungarian
plains and the southern Russian steppes as far as
Algeria, the upper Nile and the Persian Gulf, lasted
until the 20th century, ending with the secularization
of a Westernized Turkey after World War I along a
European model of government.
By 1400, the
Ottomans had extended their control over much of
Anatolia and into Byzantine territory in Eastern Europe:
Macedonia and Bulgaria. In 1402, the Ottomans moved
their capital to Edirne in southeastern Europe, where
they threatened the last great bastion of the Byzantine
Empire, its capital, Constantinople. In 1453, Sultan
Mehmed (1451-81), who was called "The Conqueror". took
this one last remnant of Byzantium and renamed it
Istanbul. From that point onward, the capital of the
Ottoman Dominion would remain in Istanbul and, under the
patronage of the Ottoman sultans, would become one of
the richest and most cultured cities in history.
Ottoman rule expanded greatly under Sultan Selim I
(1512-20). Under Sultan Suleyman (1520-66), called "The
Lawmaker" in Islamic history and "The Magnificent" in
Europe, the rule reached its greatest expansion over
Asia and Europe. The Ottomans inherited a rich mixture
of cultural traditions and political structure from
disparate civilizations and ethnic groups - Turks,
Arabs, Persians, Mongols and Mesopotamian - unified by
Islam. The Ottoman state, like other states in the
region and, in similar ways, like the Chinese state and
the European New Monarchs, rested on a principle of
absolute authority of the monarch. The nature of Ottoman
autocracy, however, has been fundamentally misunderstood
and misinterpreted with prejudice in the West.
The central function of the ruler, or sultan, in
Ottoman political theory was to guarantee justice
('adale in Arabic) in the Dominion. All authority
hinges on the ruler's personal commitment to justice.
This idea has Turco-Persian, Arabic and Islamic aspects.
In Islamic political theory, the model of a just ruler
was Solomon in Hebrew history (Suleyman was named after
Solomon). The justice represented by the Solomonic ruler
is a distributive justice; this is a justice of fairness
and equity. In addition, 'adale has
Turco-Persian-Arabic coordinates. In this tradition,
'adale starts with the protection of the helpless
from the rapacity of corrupt and predatory forces in
society and government.
In this sense, justice
involves protecting the lowest members of society, the
peasantry, from predatory exploitation, unfair taxation,
corrupt magistracy, and inequitable courts. This, in
Ottoman political theory, was the primary task of the
sultan, who personally protected his people from the
excesses of society and government, corruption of local
officials and abuse from the privileged classes. It is
the equivalent of the Chinese Confucian concept of a
Mandate of Heaven to rule, which is based on an
obligation to protect the welfare of the people. The
ruler could only guarantee this justice if he had
absolute power, lest he should be restricted by a
structural balance of power and so subject to corruption
by special-interest groups. The cooptation of government
by special-interest groups is the gravest weakness of
Western representative democracy. Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805-59) predicted accurately that equality in early US
society would eventually be endangered by the domination
of its political system by a new industrial/financial
class.
Absolute authority was justified in
building a just and virtuous government and an equitable
system of law rather than elevating the ruler above the
law, as Europeans generally misinterpreted the sultanate
by mislabeling it as despotism. This predestination of
the sultanate has commonality in principle with the
predestination of Calvinism. It parallels the rationale
of European absolute monarchy, the authority of the king
resting on his divine duty to protect the peasants from
aristocratic abuse. The concept of virtue as a
foundation of temporal power was operative in medieval
Europe. During the French Revolution, the controversial
Maximilian Robespierre believed in the dictatorship of
"virtue" in a political order. Both Montesquieu and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau held that good governance rests on
"virtue" - the unselfish public spirit and civic zeal
exemplified by personal uprightness and purity of both
the governor and the governed. The Confucian theory of a
Mandate of Heaven to rule is based on the concept of
virtue. The Western democracies, with their abduction of
the concept of modernity, are not detached from this
timeless notion of good governance, as expressed in the
doctrine of sovereignty.
Jean Bodin (1530-96),
the first to develop the theory of sovereignty in the
West, held that in every society there must be one power
with the legitimate authority to give law to all others.
The Edict of Nantes issued by Henry IV in 1598 was a
sovereign edict to protect a Huguenot (French Calvinist)
minority, composed mostly of members of the aristocracy,
against popular opposition from the Catholic peasants.
The Edict led to the assassination of the king by a
Catholic fanatic in 1610. The widowed queen, Marie de
Medicis, handed control of France to Cardinal Richelieu,
who undertook a secular policy to enhance the economic
interest of the state with mercantilist measures, by
allowing the aristocracy to engage in maritime trade
without loss of noble status, and making it possible for
merchants to become nobles by payments to the royal
exchequer. This provided a political union of the
aristocracy and the bourgeois elite that held the nation
together until the French Revolution. In 1627, the Duke
of Rohan led a Huguenot rebellion from La Rochelle with
English military support. Richelieu suppressed the
rebellion ruthlessly and modified the Edict of Nantes
with the Peace of Alais in 1629, by allowing the
Huguenots to keep their religion but stripping them of
their instruments of political power: their fortified
cities, their Protestant armies and all their military
and territorial autonomy and rights.
The Age of
New Monarchy in Europe laid the foundation for the Age
of Nation States by placing royal authority above feudal
rights, a development that began in the High Middle
Ages. The new monarchs offered the institution of
monarchy as a guarantor of law and order and promoted
hereditary monarchy as the legitimate means of
transferring public power. Monarchism was supported by
the urban bourgeoisie, as they had long been victimized
by the private wars and marauding excesses of the feudal
lords. The bourgeoisie was willing to pay taxes directly
to the king in return for peace and protection from
aristocratic abuse. Its members were willing to let
parliament, the stronghold of the aristocracy, be
dominated by the king. The direct collection of popular
taxes by the king, bypassing the feudal lords, gave the
king the necessary resources to maintain a standing army
to keep the feudal lords in check. These new monarchs
revived Roman law, which favors the state and
incorporates the will and welfare of the people in their
own persons.
The new monarchies, by breaking
down feudal tariff barriers within the kingdom,
contributed to the rise of the commercial revolution and
the development of extended cross-border markets. In the
rise of capitalism, the needs of the military had been
(and still are) of critical importance. The standing
national armies of the new monarchs required sudden
expenditures in times of war that the normal flow of tax
revenue could not meet. Private bankers emerged to
finance wars by lending the kings money secured by the
future collection of taxes from conquered lands. The
medieval prohibition of interest as usury, denounced as
the sin of avarice and forbidden by canon law, continued
to be upheld by all religions. Luther denounced
"Fruggerism" in reference to the bankers of the Holy
Roman Empire. Even Calvinism only gradually made
allowances on the issue of interest. The new monarchies,
caught between fixed income and mounting expenses, were
forced to devalue their money by diluting its gold
content. They began to borrow from private banks to deal
with recurring monetary crises. The monetary crises led
to constitutional crises that produced absolute
monarchies in Europe and the triumph of bourgeois
parliamentarianism in England.
The Bank of
Amsterdam, established in 1609, issued gold florins of
known and fixed purity, which quickly assumed the status
of international reserve currency for financing trade
and wars, making Amsterdam an international finance
center until the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. The arrival
of vast amounts of gold into Spain from its American
colonies in the 17th century greatly increased the
European specie money supply that fueled the growth of
Europe and caused a wave of gold inflation that had
economic and constitutional consequences. European
rulers became hard-pressed for money, and needed more as
their currencies fell in value.
Their common
desire to force gold and silver to flow into their
separate kingdoms found expression in mercantilism which
involved "putting the poor to work", as the English put
it, to reap the full benefit of industrialization.
Mercantilism became in the economic sphere what
nation-building of the new monarchies was in the
political. Industrial policies nurtured new industries
within every kingdom. A silk industry was brought from
Italy to France under royal protection. The migration of
skilled Flemish weavers to England was induced and
supervised by the Crown to turn England from a producer
of raw wool to an exporter of finished woolens. The king
even authorized the abduction of two youths who knew
advanced dyeing arts from faraway Ottoman regions.
France signed treaties with the Ottoman rulers in 1535
to grant French merchants special privileges, including
extraterritoriality, called capitulations, in the
Ottoman Dominion. A capitulation treaty with England was
signed in 1579, the Netherlands in 1598, Russia in 1768,
Austria in 1780 and finally with Italy and Germany in
the 19th century.
The Peace of Westphalia of
1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War blocked the
Counter-Reformation, contained expanding Hapsburg
supremacy and forestalled German unification for two
centuries. It also heralded the age of sovereign states
in Europe in a Staatensystem held together by the
doctrine of balance of power. It arrested aspiration for
a universal state in Europe until the formation of the
European Union four centuries later. It also formally
recognized Calvinism. Out of the peace rose Le Grand
Monarque in the person of the Sun King, Louis XIV of
France. Crowned at the age of five, assuming control of
government at the age of 23, and reigning for 72 years
until his death in 1715, Louis XIV ruled longer than any
other monarch in modern history. France rose to
challenge the universal monarchy status of the Holy
Roman Empire of the Hapsburgs. Europe as a whole,
stabilized by the balance of power of the Peace of
Westphalia, was able to focus on expansion beyond
Europe.
Balance of power in geopolitics refers
to the orchestration of an international equilibrium of
state power. If one power predominates, as the Holy
Roman Empire did in the 16th century, other states may
form a coalition to counterweigh it. Or, if a state is a
virtually necessary member of a coalition, more needed
by its allies than it is in need of them, it may be said
to hold the balance, or if a state belong to no
coalition at all, but its intervention on one side or
the other would be decisive in tilting the balance. The
general rule of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
governs the game of balance of power. Ideology takes a
back seat in international balance-of-power geopolitics.
Suleyman became a major player in 16th-century
European balance-of-power geopolitics by pursuing an
aggressive policy toward European destabilization, in
reaction to European expansionism. In particular, he
aimed to destabilize both the Roman Catholic Church and
the Holy Roman Empire and to contain their parallel
expansion. When Christianity split Europe into Catholic
and Protestant states, Suleyman poured financial support
into Protestant countries in order to guarantee that
Europe remain religiously and politically divided. Some
historians argue that Protestantism would never have
succeeded except for the financial support of the
Ottomans (S A Fisher-Galati: Ottoman Imperialism and
German Protestantism, 1521-1555).
Henry II
of France recognized the need for France to maintain an
Ottoman alliance against Charles V, the Hapsburg Holy
Roman emperor. The French alliance was the cornerstone
of Ottoman policy on Europe, buttressed by the natural
alliance with the Schmalkalden League of the German
Protestant princes fighting to gain political
independence from the Holy Roman Empire with the help of
theological divergence. At the instigation of the
French, Suleyman urged the German princes to cooperate
with France against the pope and the emperor. He also
assured them of amnesty from Ottoman conquest. Ottoman
pressure during the three decades between 1521 and 1555
forced the Hapsburgs to grant concessions to the
Protestants and was a factor in the eventual official
recognition, if not tolerance, of Protestantism within
the Holy Roman Empire. In the 16th century, the Ottoman
sultan claimed titular sovereignty over Venice, Poland
and the Hapsburg Empire, on the fact that they were all
tribute-paying states, and even over France when Francis
I requested Ottoman aid and formed the Ottoman alliance.
What Suleyman did not realize was that in
opposing an expanding Catholic threat, he unwittingly
encouraged a new one, more dangerous and deadly, in the
form of Protestantism and capitalistic imperialism.
Far from promoting innate expansionism, Suleyman
was in actuality responding defensively to an
aggressively expanding Europe in the 16th century. Like
many other non-Europeans, Suleyman understood the
consequences of European expansion and saw Christian
Europe as the principal threat to Islam and the Islamic
world, which was beginning to shrink under this
expansion. Portugal had invaded several Muslim cities in
East Africa in order to dominate trade with India.
Russia, which the Ottomans regarded as European, was
pushing Central Asians southward when the Russian
expansion began in the 16th century.
With a
defensive strategy of counter-invasion against and
destabilization of expansionist Europe, Suleyman pursued
a policy of helping any Muslim country threatened by
European/Christian expansion. It was the forerunner of
the Truman Doctrine to contain global communist
expansion after World War II. This predestination role
gave Suleyman the right, in the eyes of the Ottomans, to
declare himself the supreme caliph of Islam. As the only
effective leader successfully protecting Islam from the
expansionist infidels, the protector of Islam must be
the ruler of the whole Islamic world, the counterpart of
the Holy Roman emperor as the Defender of the Faith for
Catholicism. So the clash of civilizations began long
before the recent observations of Samuel Huntington.
The expansion of European power and Christianity
in the 16th century explained Suleyman's reactive
conquest of European territories. By extension, Suleyman
as universal caliph of Islam saw as his divine duty to
promote the integrity of the faith by rooting out heresy
and heterodoxy. His annexation of Islamic territory,
such as Arabia, was justified by asserting that the
ruling dynasties had abandoned orthodox belief and
practice. Each of these annexations was supported by a
religious judgment from Islamic scholars as to the
orthodoxy of the ruling dynasty.
Suleyman
undertook to make Istanbul the center of Islamic
civilization. He began a series of building projects,
including bridges, mosques and palaces, that rivaled the
greatest building projects of the world of his time. One
of the world's great architects, Sinan, designed mosques
that are considered the greatest architectural triumphs
of Islam. Suleyman was a great sponsor of the arts and
considered one of the great poets of Islam. Under
Suleyman, Istanbul became the center of the visual arts,
music, literature, and philosophy in the Islamic world.
This cultural flowering during the reign of Suleyman
represents the most creative period in Ottoman history;
almost all the cultural forms that history associates
with the Ottomans date from this time.
During
the century after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, two
developments of far-reaching importance for the modern
world took place in Central and Eastern Europe. The
first was the rise of German nationalism in the east,
resuming the Drang nach Osten (drive to the
east). The second was the participation of Russia in the
affairs of Europe. The commercial revolution widened the
extended markets, which in the west gave rise to the
bourgeoisie to exploit labor systematically, and in the
east correspondingly strengthened traditional feudal
institutions of labor subjugation, such as serfdom.
The three new expanding states of Russia,
Austria-Hungary and Prussia inevitably encroached on the
three older states: the Holy Roman Empire, which
Voltaire ridiculed as neither holy, Roman, nor empire;
Poland; and the Ottoman Dominion. Poland was a vast
kingdom that extended from east of Berlin to west of
Moscow and from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
The differences of the three old states did not
exempt them from similar fates of imperialist partition.
The rising Western European powers promoted the concept
of ethnic nationalism against the titular central
authority of the older universal states. Issues of
national minorities were twisted to appear as issues
national self-determination for the benefit of Western
imperialism.
From the beginning of history, size
has always been a structural advantage in a competitive
environment. "Balkanization" became a word to mean
separatist pressure against a large state to break it
into small dissenting minor states ripe for new
domination by other powers. A balkanization of the
former Soviet Union took place on December 26, 1991,
that created 15 new nations dominated by the
capitalistic West. Yugoslavia was balkanized into seven
new nations between 1991 and 1994 that required North
Atlantic Treaty Organization intervention to keep peace
as the West saw fit.
With all their other
differences, the three older universal states had one
common characteristic. Each in its own way had an
elective structure to yield a central authority over a
political realm of diverse ethnic, cultural and
religious complexity. The Holy Roman Empire had no
standing army after the Peace of Westphalia, having been
devastated by the Thirty Years' War and weakened by the
tradition of "German liberties" embedded in provincial
state sovereignty claimed by more than 300 small German
states. The electors at each election required the Holy
Roman emperor to accept capitulations to safeguard the
feudal rights of the states and religious autonomy. Like
the Ottoman Dominion, absolutism in the Holy Roman
Empire was decentralized to the local rulers, who did
not in turn empower their subjects. The failure of the
supreme sovereign to protect the people caused a
weakening of popular loyalty to the emperor in the case
of the Holy Roman Empire, as it was to the sultan in the
case of the Ottoman Dominion.
Poland, like the
Holy Roman Empire, did not develop a central authority
along absolutist lines, because of the tradition of
"Polish liberties" enjoyed by the Polish aristocrats, or
szlachta, who elected the Polish king. The
elective process was even a target of foreign intrigue.
Like the Holy Roman Empire, Poland became a political
vacuum under stress from centers of high political
pressure around Berlin and Moscow.
The Ottoman
Dominion was larger than the other two older states and
more solidly organized. The Ottoman sultan had a
standing army long before any European new monarchy had
managed the same. Unlike the Romans, who developed state
law, the Ottoman relied on the Koran as the source of
Ottoman law. Non-Muslims within the dominion were left
to settle their disputes according to the own religious
precepts and remained largely outside Ottoman law, but
not lawless. The Ottoman weakness was its tolerance, as
compared with the absolutism and belligerent theocracy
of the new European nation states, not Oriental
despotism, as Western historians wrongly claim.
Modernity in its distorted form had been polluted by
political absolutism from its very beginning.
The history of the world would have been very
different had the Kingdom of Poland in the 17th century
held together, or the Ottoman Dominion had successfully
resisted partition. There would have been no Prussia or
Prussian influence in German unification, nor would
Russia have become a major Slavic power, nor would the
Balkans and Middle East today be fragmented into arenas
of European rivalry to become the powder kegs of another
future World War in the 21st century. Universal
political dominion based on virtue was preempted as the
model political institution of modernity by 17th-century
imperialist nation-states built on absolutism in the
form of new empires, modified subsequently by
representative democracy controlled by the propertied
class who saw the purpose of civilization as a
continuous quest for more property through the
enslavement of the world's weak.
This
celebration of barbarism as modernity has enslaved
four-fifths of the world population into centuries of
protracted poverty, produced two World Wars and
countless local and regional conflicts, and turned the
scientific revolution into an arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction that continue to threaten the survival of
the human race.
The 19th century was the final
century of virtuous Ottomanism. The principal historical
factor in Ottoman decline was the hyper-aggressive
expansion of European imperialist powers that rose in
the age of nation-states that evolved naturally into the
age of colonization.
At the beginning of the
17th century, the Ottoman Dominion was still the most
powerful universal state in the world outside of China,
both in wealth and power. The personal style of
governance based on virtue cultivated among the earlier
sultans had gradually dissipated. In place of sultanic
governance, the bureaucracy ran the Islamic Dominion.
Power struggles among the various elements of the
bureaucracy - the grand vizier, the Diwan, or
supreme court, and especially the military, the
Janissaries - led to frequent and volatile shifts of
political power.
Islamic historians point out
that the growth of the bureaucracy and the sultans'
uninterest in performing their traditional roles of
personifying virtue led to corrupt and predatory local
governments, which in turn eroded popular support for
the central authority. Western historians point to
internal decline in the Ottoman bureaucracy, along with
the increased military efficiency of European powers, as
the principal reasons for the decline of the Dominion.
A case can be made that Ottoman decline was
caused by a lost of virtue as a governing principle.
Nevertheless, the decline of virtuous Ottomanism was a
gradual and protracted affair lasting more than two
centuries. The Ottoman Dominion itself existed nominally
as a political entity until World War I, after which it
was partitioned out of existence by imperialist European
powers. Modernization and revival of a new Ottomanism
requires a rediscovery of political virtue, rather than
copying the warped model of the imperialistic West.
The process of selecting leaders has plagued all
forms of government. Ottomanism believed that the sultan
was selected primarily through divine kut, a
Turkish word meaning "favor". All members of the ruling
family had equal claim to the throne. This regal
democracy led to the Ottoman practice of royal
fratricide to prevent rebellion or rival claims to the
throne. Whereas the West labeled this practice as cruel
and barbaric, the Ottomans viewed it as a supreme
sacrifice required of the ruling family to sustain
stability and legitimacy.
In the late 16th
century, the Ottoman sultans abandoned this practice of
extreme prejudice in favor of primogeniture, possibly
because of Western influence. Still skeptical of
fraternal loyalty, the brothers of the sultan and the
heirs to the throne were locked away in isolation in the
palace harem. Some went mad from solitary confinement,
but most simply became fat and indolent, addicted to
alcohol, drugs, gluttony, sex and aimless leisure. All
of them made bad sultans, completely disengaged from
governance by virtue. In fact, internecine palace
politics, manipulated by foreign interests, often
selected new sultans on the basis on their uninterest in
government. Instead of Westernizing their succession
practice, the Ottomans should have sought their own path
of political modernization. In addition, the sultans
abandoned the earlier practice of training their heirs
to assume the sultanate by providing them with education
and leadership training and having them serve in
government and the military to gain understanding and
experience as effective rulers.
This departure
from the vigor of a virtuous sultanate was the prime
cause of Ottoman decline, not the sultanate form of
government itself as Western historians claimed. It
happened also to the absolutist kings of France after
Louis XIV, who built Versailles to keep the French
royalty and aristocrats in luxury and out of politics.
The popular election of leaders, which often yields
leaders of political expediency devoid of long-range
vision, is also be one of the key weaknesses of the
Western democracies.
As a result of the
disintegration of the institution of the virtuous
sultanate, power went to the Janissaries, the military
arm of the government. Throughout the 17th century, the
Janissaries slowly took over top military and
administrative posts in the government and passed these
offices on to their sons, mainly through bribery.
Because of this corrupt practice, Ottoman government
soon began to be administered by a military feudal class
that had little military leadership skills. Under early
Ottomanism, position in the government was determined
solely through merit. After the 16th century, positions
in government were largely hereditary. The quality of
the political leadership, the bureaucracy and the
military staff declined precipitously.
Muhammad
Kuprili (1570-1661), as grand vizier, halted the general
decline of Ottoman government by rooting out corruption
in the imperial government and returned to the
traditional Ottoman practice of closely supervising
local governments and rooting out local injustice. He
also tried to revive the Ottoman universalist practice
of protecting Muslim countries from European expansion.
This new defensive policy, without the support of an
effective military, led to a steady stream of Ottoman
military defeats by European powers, which steadily
contracted the dominion.
A revived Ottoman
threat had produced a coalition of European forces. The
Ottomans were forced to accept a 20-year peace in 1664.
In 1683, urged on by French instigation, the Ottoman
army put Vienna under siege, but was defeated by an
alliance of European forces with heavy artillery. King
John III of Poland personally led a large army to
relieve Vienna and saved Europe from the incalculable
consequence of a Turkish foothold in Germany. It was the
last victory of Poland before its own partition
engineered by the same Austria that the Polish king had
saved, with the participation of Prussia and Russia.
During a general withdrawal, the Ottomans had to
face a broad counter-offensive composed of forces of the
Vatican, Poland, Russia and Venice, joined by the
Hapsburgs. It was in this war during the battle between
the Venetians and the Turks that the Parthenon in
Athens, which had survived intact for 2,000 years, was
blown apart as an ammunition dump. While this defeat
initiated a long peace between the Ottomans and the
Europeans, it also in effect began the steady
deterioration of Ottoman control over European
territories.
In 1699, the Ottomans were forced
to accept the Peace of Karlowitz, which handed over to
Austria the provinces of Hungary and Transylvania,
leaving only Macedonia and the Balkans under Ottoman
control. But the Balkans had begun to destabilize after
the Ottoman defeat of 1683. In the 18th century, the
Ottomans fought a series of defensive wars against
European powers. Between 1714 and 1718, they fought
against the small city-state of Venice; between 1736 and
1739, they fought against Austria and Russia in order to
stop the expansion of these powers into Muslim
territories. The Russians in particular continued to
expand aggressively into Muslim territories in Central
Asia; these small Muslim states had no place to turn to
except to the Ottomans. War with Russia, in fact,
dominated the Ottoman scene from much of the 18th
century; the two states clashed between 1768 and 1774,
and again between 1787 and 1792. In all these wars of
the 18th century, there were no clear victors or losers.
European historians tend to view Ottoman decline
mainly from the perspective of defeat in wars with
Europe. While these wars were significant milestones,
Ottoman decline resulted more from economic imperialism
that began in the 18th century that led to such defeats
in war. Two overwhelming underlying aspects of this
decline have also been put forth: meteoric population
increase and the failure to industrialize. Yet both of
these developments were the results rather than the
causes of Ottoman decline.
The 17th and 18th
centuries were periods of prosperity in the Ottoman
Dominion. As a result, the population of the dominion
doubled, which normally would have increased Ottoman
power. However, the economic resources of the dominion
did not grow with the population increase because of
European economic infringement in the form of mercantile
imperialism. This eventually led to a massive drain of
wealth out of the dominion, causing endemic unemployment
and even periodic famine.
The wealth of the
Ottomans had largely been due to their strategic
presence on trade routes. The Dominion stood astride the
crossroads of all the continents and subcontinents:
Africa, Asia, India, and Europe. However, European
expansion created new trade routes that skirted Ottoman
territories. Because the state collected tariffs on all
goods passing through the dominion, the economy and the
central government lost vast amounts of revenue to new
trade routes. What tariffs remained were collected by
Europeans who took control of Ottoman customs for the
benefit of European economies.
In addition, the
Ottomans did not industrialize as the Europeans did in
the 18th century. Industrialization principally involved
an overhaul of labor practices through the private
control of capital and its formation, which accompanied
the rise of the bourgeoisie. The Ottoman state,
politically a loose dominion and economically based on
agriculture and trade, retained centuries-old feudal
labor practices, in which production was concentrated in
farming and among craft guilds.
Manufacturing
did not become a major sector of the Ottoman economy for
complex reasons, not the least of which were the
reliance on trade flow of goods produced outside the
dominion and a shortage of domestic capital needed for
industrialization. The shortage of capital was cause by
the outflow of wealth through Western imperialism.
Increasingly, the economic relationships between the
Ottomans and the Europeans evolved into one of
imperialistic exploitation, with Europeans buying raw
materials at low prices from the Ottomans as part of the
privileges granted by "capitulations", and shipping back
finished products manufactured in industrialized Europe
at great profit, destroying the Ottoman craft industries
in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By the time
the Ottomans realized this trade disadvantage, European
imperialism was too entrenched to permit belated
industrialization in the Ottoman Dominion.
Against the mercantilist policies of the
European powers, Ottoman officials clung to an
open-free-market policy, the main concern being to
provide the home market with an abundant supply of
imported commodities and luxuries. The Ottomans mistook
mercantilist imports from Europe as tributes that they
had traditionally enjoyed for centuries from other
nations. Ottoman elites became compradors for foreign
interests rather than national industrialists. Unable to
formulate a comprehensive protectionist policy for the
entire dominion because of its local autonomous
structure, the Ottoman sultans allowed the European
powers gradually to take control of trade within the
Ottoman realm by playing one locality against another,
in a race toward the bottom, in much the same way
neo-liberalism plays one emerging economy against
another today, putting them in the position of competing
for the privilege of being exploited at a lower cost.
The character of the "capitulation" tariff
concessions originally granted to France by Suleyman as
part of his balance-of-power strategy three centuries
earlier gradually changed to reduce the Ottoman economy
to a dependency of European masters. These treaties of
capitulation robbed the Ottomans of their economic
independence. With the loss of control of its custom
tariffs, the Ottoman Dominion was unable to protect its
economy from European mercantilism. Wealth flowed from
the Ottoman region into Europe, depriving the local
formation of capital needed for industrialization and
fueled further advances in European industrialization.
European investment and loans in the Ottoman Dominion
went only to enterprises that reinforced foreign
domination and further reduced the Ottoman state to
total financial dependency. The Ottoman Bank, founded in
1856 as a state bank, fell into the total control by
English and French capital. Public work and industrial
exploitation were financed by foreign capital with all
profits flowing abroad and funding only projects that
furthered European control.
Ottoman history in
the 19th century was dominated by European wars and
expansion. The Europeans scrambled for territory
throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, some of
which was European territory through inter-European
rivalry, but the bulk of which was increasingly outside
Western Europe. History had never seen such rapid and
frenetic annexation of territory as in the 19th and
early 20th centuries by the Western Europeans. A new
attitude emerged through the acquisition of non-Western
territory in what historians call the New Imperialism,
in which the newly subjugated peoples were not absorbed
as equals but were considered inferior, notwithstanding
their ancient culture and history. The result for the
Ottomans was not only the loss of dominion territory
and, finally, the demise of the Ottoman dynasty itself,
but also an imposed arrest of further development of
Ottomanism and its civilization and set it along a path
of inevitable decline.
Throughout the
non-Western world, anything non-Western was by
definition considered by Western cultural hegemony as
backward and not modern. Reform and modernization
movements in most non-Western systems were conditioned
to accept erroneously as a prerequisite to modernization
the wholesale rejection of local indigenous culture and
tradition, throwing out the timeless good with the
obsolete. Modernization was abducted by Western cultural
imperialism as Westernization.
But since
Westernization is unnatural and inhibiting to indigenous
creativeness for non-Westerners, whose instinctive
indigenous thought processes and creativeness are
systematically and categorically dismissed by Western
cultural hegemony, modernization has condemned the
non-Western world to centuries of cultural stagnation
and de facto inferiority as measured against artificial
Western standards. Learned discourses increasingly are
conducted only in European languages, making non-Western
concepts obscure and difficult to articulate. This was
most evident in the two highly sophisticated and
cultured living civilizations - the Ottoman/Arab and the
Chinese, both of which fell victim to Western political,
economic and cultural imperialism at about the same
time. Even the culture of ancient Greece was abducted by
the West from the Arabs, through whose scholarly
translations the West had rediscovered the Greek
classics.
Non-Western nationalism was promoted
by the Western European new monarchies as a tool to
weaken and break up ancient superstates, from the Holy
Roman Empire to the Ottoman Dominion to China, not for
creating new powerful non-Western states against Western
imperialism. Early-20th-century nationalist leaders in
both China and Turkey, and in fact the world over, in
focusing on political struggles against Western
imperialism, unwittingly allowed themselves to be
victimized by Western cultural hegemony. They made the
serious error of confusing modernity with
Westernization, an error from which their successors are
not entirely free even today. These nationalist leaders
by and large accepted the proposition that the way to
resist Western oppression was to out-Western the
Westerners, thus setting themselves in a no-win game,
and played directly into the hands of the hegemonic
West.
Next: Imperialism and
fragmentation
Henry C K Liu is chairman of the
New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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