19 results in Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems
4 - The Renaissance City-State System
- Andrew Linklater, Aberystwyth University
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Summary
In the process of transformation and innovation that we designate by the term, ‘Renaissance’, what was regarded as ‘fitting’ and ‘unfitting’ in human intercourse no doubt changed to a certain degree. But the rupture was not marked by a sudden demand for new modes of behaviour opposed to the old.
(Elias 2012: 86)Italian Renaissance thinkers invented the idea of Middle Ages to describe the period of ‘barbarism’ that intervened between classical antiquity and their era. Leading humanists regarded their epoch as one of rebirth and renewal through the discovery of ancient texts and the reacquaintance with lost traditions. The idea of the Renaissance was a mid-nineteenth-century innovation, introduced by the French historian, Michelet, to characterize an intellectual and cultural movement rather to describe a unique historical era with a definite beginning and end (Brotton 2006: 8ff.; Burke 1987). Whether the term can be usefully employed to describe a clearly delineated epoch has long been debated. In the following discussion, the Renaissance refers to the period of Italian history that lasted from around 1350 to 1550 (see Caferro 2011: 22ff.). A central issue is whether the Renaissance differed substantially from the so-called Middle Ages, or was so closely interconnected with, or indebted to, the medieval world that it is misleading to regard it as the birth of the modern era (Larkins 2010: ch. 6). Huizinga (1955) described it as a crucial phase in the waning of the Middle Ages. Nineteenth-century thinkers such as Michelet and Burckhardt portrayed the Renaissance not as a discrete epoch but as a mentality or ‘spirit’ that was centred on the rise of individuality and signified the appearance of novel understandings of what it meant to be ‘civilized’ (Brotton 2006: 9ff.).
Burckhardt's thesis that Renaissance views of ‘the state as a work of art’ and the alleged celebration of individuality were evidence of distinctively modern attitudes to the world have long been rejected. Major cultural ‘breakthroughs’ are now presented as having paved the road to ‘modernity’.
Preface and Acknowledgements
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The following investigation extends the argument for a comparative sociology of states-systems that was developed in the final chapter of The Problem of Harm in World Politics: Theoretical Investigations (Cambridge 2011). A central aim is to analyse the extent to which agreed standards of self-restraint that were linked with shared conceptions of civility or civilization have shaped the development of Western states-systems. A related objective is to determine whether the dominant patterns of self-restraint in the contemporary international system are radically different from those that existed in the preceding arrangements. It is to show what modern standards of restraint owe to their predecessors and to begin to explain the key differences.
The inquiry is designed to advance Martin Wight's comparative approach to states-systems by drawing on the considerable resources of Eliasian or process sociology. The latter provided a provisional explanation of how modern Europeans came to regard themselves as more ‘civilized’ than their medieval forebears and more ‘advanced’ than surrounding ‘barbarians’. The general pattern of social development was said to be evident in an overall decline in the level of interpersonal violence over approximately five centuries, and in an attendant growing aversion to pain and suffering. It identified changes in what is permissible and what is forbidden within state-organized societies. The argument was that continuity rather than change has been the norm in the relations between political communities. In several publications, Elias referred to mounting pressures on societies to resolve their differences peacefully and to collaborate to deal with the problems of interconnectedness that faced them all. He described the ways in which the idea of civilization had shaped modern Western attitudes to violence including genocide. What was missing, however, and is still in need of elaboration, is an account of how far changing conceptions of permissible and impermissible violence are evident not only within modern nation-states but in the relations between them.
Elias wrote extensively about civilizing processes but paid little attention to international societies of states including the modern one. He did not see them as particular forms of social and political integration with distinctive civilizing processes and standards of restraint.
7 - Enlightenment Thought and Global Civilization
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The concept underlying this enlightened, socially critical reform movement was always the same: that the improvement of institutions, education and law will be brought about by the advance of knowledge … Progress would be achieved, therefore, first by the enlightenment of kings and rulers in conformity with ‘reason’ or ‘nature’, which comes to the same thing, and then by placing in leading positions enlightened (that is, reform-minded) men. A certain aspect of this whole progressive process of reform came to be designated by a fixed concept: civilisation … Society, from this point of view, had reached a particular stage on the road to civilisation. But it was insufficient. Society could not stand still there. The process was continuing and ought to be pushed further: ‘the civilisation of peoples is not yet complete.’
(Elias 2012: 55, italics in original)‘Civilization’ was incomplete, Holbach argued in the late eighteenth century, because human reason had yet to be employed intelligently to improve society. Numerous obstacles delayed ‘the progress of useful knowledge’ that could be applied to ensure the perfection of government, social institutions and morals, but nothing did more to block advances in ‘public happiness’, or the ‘progress of human reason’, or ‘the entire civilization of men’ than ‘the continual wars into which thoughtless princes are drawn at every moment’ (Holbach, cited in Elias 2012: 54–5). Central features of the so-called Enlightenment project are contained in that observation: the belief in reason as an instrument not only of social reform but of indefinite progress, and the vision of a cosmopolitan future in which all peoples are bound together by universal moral principles that demonstrate the unique accomplishments of European civilization (Schlereth 1977). Whether the so-called Enlightenment project is a caricature of the dominant ideas of the period is a matter to come back to later. The main issues are best approached by stating that the Enlightenment was a crucial phase in the long-term development of a civilizing process that was profoundly influenced by court rationality (Elias 2012: ch. 2) That process led to ideals of civility and visions of the ‘polite nation’ that combined cosmopolitan aspirations with confidence in the superiority of French standards of behaviour (Zurbuchen 2003; Gordon 1994, especially ch. 3; Gay 1969: 41ff.).
11 - Process Sociology, Civilization and International Society
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The fact that we have not yet learned how to curb wars, the reciprocal mass destructions of members of different states, and other forms of behaviour that one cannot help calling barbarous, lends support to the assumption that in the overall context of the possible development of humankind what we call modern times represents a very early rather than a late stage of development … We have not yet learned to cope with the obvious contradictions of our age. We know already that human beings are able to live in a much more civilised manner with each other … We know already that much depends on achieving a better balance between self-restraint and self-fulfilment, but a stable social order that warrants such a balance still eludes us. It should not be beyond the reach of humankind in the thousands of years ahead of us
(Elias 2011: 174, italics in original)Elias maintained that Caxton's comment that ‘things that were permitted are now forbidden’ could stand as the ‘motto’ for the civilizing process that was to come (see Chapter 5, p. 201). The European path of social and development shaped diverse and interrelated spheres of social interaction including the standards that governed bodily functions, changes in table manners and (of particular importance for the present discussion) shifts in emotional responses to cruelty and violence. Elias was less consistent on the subject of whether things that were once permitted in the relations between states are now forbidden. His reflections of world politics raised, but did not answer, important questions about whether, or how far, the modern global system is different from its predecessors. One of the aims of this chapter is to consider how the process-sociological analysis of violence and civilization contributes to a comparative analysis of the Western states-systems that attempts to answer the question of how far distinctive understandings of what is permissible and forbidden have developed in contemporary international society.
3 - The International Relations of Latin Christendom
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Leaving aside a small elite, rapine, pillage and murder were standard practice in the warrior society of (the) time … Outbursts of cruelty did not exclude one from social life. They were not outlawed. The pleasure in killing and torturing others was great, and it was a socially permitted pleasure. To a certain extent, the social structure even pushed its members in this direction, making it seem necessary and practically advantageous to behave in this way
(Elias: 2012: 189)The medieval political order did not consist of relatively autonomous political units that were bound together by shared understandings about standards of restraint that can be found in the international states-systems of antiquity, or the Italian Renaissance city-states system, or the modern global figuration of sovereign political communities. As a result of identification with the societas christiana, ‘unity rather than separateness’ – ‘hierarchy rather than equality’ – characterized relations between the constituent units (Wight 1977: 25–7). So powerful were we-feelings organized around the idea of ‘the normative unity of the Christian world’ that the physical ‘separation … into kingdoms and duchies was considered illegitimate by most and epiphenomenal even by the temporal rulers who benefited from it’ (Fischer 1992:435–6). If there was a medieval states-system, it consisted of the ‘triangular relationship between Eastern Christendom, Western Christendom and the Islamic world’, but one that was complicated by the reality that none of those political entities formed a ‘singular power-bloc’ (Wight 1977: 25). Latin Christendom is perhaps best regarded as a ‘uniquely complicated dualistic or double-headed suzerain state-system’ in which the empire and papacy asserted rival claims for authority over the subordinate parts (Wight 1977: 29). Many of those actors would go onto assert and acquire rights of sovereignty that altered the we–I balance between Latin Christendom and particular ‘survival units’. During the wars of religion, the restraining effect of earlier shared universal convictions declined sharply (Phillips 2011: chs. 4–5). Prior to that era, the papacy came closest to displaying the basic hallmarks of a state (Wight 1977: 28; also Davies 2003; Reynolds 1997, 2003 and Larkins 2010).
Epigraph
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Contents
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1 - The Hellenic City-States System
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The Ancient Greeks … who are so often held up to us as models of civilized behaviour, considered it quite a matter of course to commit acts of mass destruction, not quite identical to those of the National Socialists but, nevertheless, similar to them in certain respects. The Athenian popular assembly decided to wipe out the entire population of Melos, because the city did not want to join the Athenian colonial empire. There were dozens of other examples in antiquity of what we now call genocide. The difference between this and the attempted genocide in the 1930s and 1940s is at first glance not easy to grasp. Nevertheless, it is quite clear. In the period of Greek antiquity, this warlike behaviour was considered normal. It conformed to the standard.
(Elias 2013: 445–6)The contrasts that Elias drew between ancient and modern warfare must be treated with considerable caution. His observations about the greater tolerance of genocide in classical Greece and Rome captured certain features of the wars between Athens and Sparta, but serious doubts must be raised about whether they provided an accurate summation of the main patterns of development across the whole history of the Hellenic city-states system. The comments about genocide seem to imply that international relations in ancient Greece were remarkably static: an interpretation that is supported in some but not all quarters (see the contrasting views of van Wees 2004; Connor 1988; and Low 2007). If those who reject the interpretation that ‘total war’ was endemic are correct, then, paradoxically, Elias's comments were at odds with his processual standpoint – with a long-term perspective on social interaction that analysed recurring geopolitical competition and war in conjunction with shifting relations between civilizing and decivilizing processes or integrative and disintegrative tendencies.
Elias's remarks on ancient and modern attitudes to genocide certainly stressed that social attitudes to violence had changed over time. Commenting on the pankration – literally, ‘total force’ or ‘no holds barred’, or a form of ground wrestling in which participants were not infrequently killed – Elias (2008b: 117–18) speculated that the ‘standards of violence in fighting may have fluctuated’ over the thousand year period in which the Olympic Games were held.
8 - Total Warfare and Decivilizing Processes
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It is true that people no longer hunt each other for food. Cannibalism, as well as slavery, has become rarer. But the way in which people maim, kill and torture each other in the course of their power struggles, their wars, revolutions and other violent conflicts, is different mainly in terms of the techniques used and the numbers of people concerned.
(Elias 2007: 175)Kant's vision of perpetual peace was the high point of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. It anticipated a world in which states display unusually high levels of self-restraint, guided by universal moral principles that attuned them to the realities of the closer interweaving of societies. Kant broadly agreed with Condorcet's belief that the species had reached the shores of a great revolution in history. Because of his confidence in the liberating power of scientific elites, Condorcet (1965 [1794]: 53–4) was more optimistic that the present stage of human development promised a future in which ‘all enlightened men, from then on onwards … will be the friends of humanity [and] will work together for its perfection and its happiness’. Kant would not have disagreed with Concordet's hope that, in the future, all peoples would regard war as the greatest of all evils (Hampson 1968: 244). Such visions that located traditional reflections on ‘the good society’ within a more fundamental discussion of the ideal global order represented a significant extension of earlier critiques of the double standard of morality in social and political life. The conviction that the two moralities were problematical or ‘contradictory’ reflected the growing influence of post-aristocratic, bourgeois universalistic norms in European societies. Support increased for the belief that more onerous ethical expectations should apply in the relations between states, that there should be greater accountability to the members of other societies, and that substantially higher levels of self-monitoring and self-restraint should govern the conduct of foreign policy.
Enlightenment cosmopolitanism underpinned the assault on colonialism and slavery, and it informed the critique of a civilization that condemned the cruelty and unrestrained lives of ‘savages’ while despatching thousands to violent death in modern warfare. It represented a radical shift in thinking about the possibilities of a civilizing process that extended beyond national borders.
5 - The European States-System and the Idea of Civilization
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The wars of the seventeenth century were cruel in a somewhat different sense from those of today. The army had, as far as possible, to feed itself when on foreign soil. Plunder and rapine were not merely permitted, but were demanded by military technique. To torment the subjugated inhabitants of occupied territories and to set fire to their houses – all this was, as well as a means of satisfying lust, a deliberate means of collecting war contributions and bringing to light concealed treasure. Soldiers were expected to behave like robbers. It was banditry exacted and organised by the army commanders
(Elias 2006: 101–2)Elias's comments about seventeenth-century warfare have to be considered in conjunction with his reflections on the longer-term process of state formation that was centred on the dual monopolization of the instruments of violence and taxation. Territorial concentrations of power led to advances in domestic pacification. But the citation at the beginning of this chapter drew attention to the violent character of state formation. The passage was part of a larger discussion about the expulsion of the Huguenots from France that highlighted the use of pliable returning troops to achieve a royal political objective with parallels in many other parts of Europe where emergent states were similarly engaged in rounding out territory, consolidating centralized powers, and subduing recalcitrant subjects (Rae 2002). The wars of that period, Elias argued, were not less cruel than the struggles of the present era; they were cruel in different ways. But what form did cruelty take, and how should later changes be explained? The questions are fundamental to reflections on the distinguishing features of the modern states-system in the following five chapters and to the concluding observations about how key differences are best explained. Those considerations require some observations later in this introduction about the distinctive features of a process-sociological approach to analysing the relationship between violence and civilization in the modern system of states.
Returning to the questions above, part of the reason for the cruelty of seventeenth-century armies is that they had to live off the land; plunder was an essential means of survival. The citation stresses that there was more to their behaviour than violent self-reliance.
10 - Sovereignty, Citizenship and Humanity in the Global Civilizing Process
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The peoples of the earth are now confronted by [the] task … of contributing gradually to a renunciation of the traditional warlike institutions through voluntary self-limitation, and perhaps even through voluntary submission to the arbitration of humanity. The mass of human beings, and in particular the leading strata of states, may perhaps gradually advance towards that stage of civilisation. But … the task of achieving a pacification of humanity which is not enforced externally but is based on voluntary decisions remains for the present insoluble.
(Elias 2010c: 145)The principle of sovereignty has been central to European state formation and the process of civilization, and fundamental to the development of the modern society of states from its emergence in Europe to its subsequent enlargement to embrace the entire inhabited world. It was important in legitimating state monopoly powers and in the construction of a unique we–I balance in the international states-system. Indeed, to write a history of sovereignty is effectively to document the development of that balance in the relations between territorial states. Modern conceptions of sovereignty became linked with the principle that states are obliged to comply only with international legal obligations that they have freely imposed on themselves. The general understanding was that acts of self-limitation could be reversed when sovereign states decided that they had become incompatible with core objectives, and when they assumed – as they were legally entitled to do – that it was necessary to use force to protect vital security interests. But that was not how sovereignty was constructed in the early history of the modern states-system and, because of the influence of the European civilizing process, it is not how it is understood today.
The first part of the following discussion notes that political theories that defined sovereignty in terms of absolute rights rather than responsibilities were the product of a long process in which Christian ethical constraints on state power were weakened. They were the outcome of a changing we–I balance that reflected a particular phase in the development of relationships between sovereign powers, international society and humanity.
Frontmatter
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Introduction
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The central question in the following discussion is whether modern ethical attitudes to the use of force are significantly different from the prevalent assumptions about violence and suffering in the earlier Western states-systems. A few comments about specific writings on that subject will explain how that problem arises; they point the way towards a solution. Wight speculated that the ancient Greeks and Romans appear to have had little or no conception of ‘international ethics’ that restrained violent harm. He highlighted the differences between the states-systems of classical antiquity and the modern international order where moral sensitivities to the use of force appear to be more developed. In support of the conjecture, Wight (1966: 126) referred to the Allies’ rejection of Stalin's suggestion that the German General Staff should be liquidated at the end of the Second World War. The implication was that peoples of classical antiquity were less troubled by the summary execution of enemy leaders. There is a striking parallel with Elias's observation about the differences between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ responses to what has come to be known as genocide. Information about the Holocaust produced shock and revulsion amongst ‘civilized’ peoples, not least because of the realization that one of them – another advanced, technological society – had organized mass slaughter on an industrial scale. But, Elias argued, massacres were commonplace in classical antiquity, and usually passed without comment or condemnation.
Those comments are puzzling for these reasons. As will be discussed below, Wight maintained that international relations constitute ‘the realm of recurrence and repetition’, while Elias stated in one place that little seems to change in world politics apart from the methods of killing and the number of people involved. Modern ‘civilized’ peoples, the latter added, are still living much as our ancestors did ‘in the period of their so-called “barbarism”’ (Elias 2013: 190). The level of domestic pacification had increased in European societies over recent centuries, but the tolerance of force in relations with enemies had not been significantly reduced. The presumption was that a global equivalent to the European civilizing process that had forbidden many practices that had once been permitted is unlikely to occur in the absence of a higher monopoly of coercive power that can provide levels of security that are comparable to the peaceful conditions that are largely taken for granted in ‘civilized’ societies.
Bibliography
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2 - New Territorial Concentrations of Power in Antiquity
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Part I The Rise and Fall of the Hellenistic States-System
the social dynamic which drives states over and over again to progress from the desire for freedom from domination by other states and for equality with them, to an urge to be stronger than all the others, to gain predominance over them … drives them into a struggle for hegemony which sooner or later, and again and again, must be fought out with military violence.
(Elias 2010c: 98)Elias's observation about the ‘social dynamic’ that has driven successive quests for political supremacy and empire was central to his overview of key features of international politics in the ancient world. He described the struggle for hegemony in which Athens, Corinth, Sparta and Thebes competed for domination. The ensuing military stalemate was followed by the unification of reluctant city states under Macedonian rule (Elias 2010c: 119–20). A similar dynamic was evident in Alexander's relentless conquest to subdue ever more distant peoples that was undertaken in the belief that, at some future time, on the edges of the empire, armies would acquire total control over an ‘absolutely secure frontier’ (Elias 2010c: 93–4). A parallel orientation explained Rome's domination of neighbouring groups that, by their very existence as independent societies, were portrayed as endangering the imperial peace (Elias 2010c: 91–5). Elias's argument was that struggles for security and ‘hegemonic intoxication’ entangled states in geopolitical rivalries that could only be resolved – or so they believed – by violence. The three international systems described above collapsed for that reason. The stalemate between the major Greek city states, following a series of debilitating wars and the conflict with Persia, left the Hellenes entirely at the mercy of a new territorial concentration of power – Macedon. Alexander's empire collapsed because rapid expansion created a sprawling empire of diverse peoples that could not be unified symbolically, ruled effectively from a central administrative point, or guaranteed security from external threats (Elias 2010c: 93–4). Rome's initial expansion responded to what it regarded as challenges to its ‘physical security and integrity’ but, gripped by ‘hegemonic intoxication’ and convinced of its ‘superiority and invincibility’, it proceeded to launch a wave of military campaigns to subdue outlying groups.
Conclusion
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The speculation that the ancient Greeks and Romans did not possess the equivalent of modern ethical sensitivities to violent harm and the contention that they did not condemn what has come to be known as genocide have framed this inquiry. A central objective has been to assess those empirical contentions about the differences between the dominant harm conventions in the ancient and modern states-systems. The investigation has specifically engaged with Wight's observation that all international societies appear to have developed within a bounded cultural region where sharp distinctions were presumed to exist between the ‘advanced’ and the ‘backward’ peoples, and by his claim – which has a direct parallel in Elias's writings – that modern ethical sensibilities to violence and suffering in warfare may have been absent in the ‘simpler civilizations’. Those observations were in competition with the proposition that international relations have barely changed in some fundamental respects over the millennia.
The relationship between civilizations and international societies and, particularly, the issue of how far ‘civilized’ values have influenced relations between independent political communities in the modern era have been fundamental to this approach to the sociology of states-systems. Wight's foundational essay on that subject was largely silent on how the two phenomena were related. There was no discussion of how civilizations – or civilizing processes – shaped, and were influenced by, the development of international societies. The argument in these pages has been that understanding the distinctive moral sensitivities to which Wight referred, requires an examination of the process which was central to Elias's exploration of long-term trends over approximately the last five centuries. As the last few chapters have argued, the process-sociological analysis of the development of civilized self-images has to be modified to show how state formation was the hub of a triad of interrelated developments that included the rise of the overseas empires and the emergence of a distinctive European international society. How far emotional attitudes to violence and suffering changed at each of those levels, and in interconnected ways, has been a central question in this inquiry.
9 - Modernity, Civilization and the Holocaust
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Like scientific mass wars, the highly organized and scientifically planned extermination of whole groups of people in specially designed death camps and sealed-off ghettos by starvation, gassing or shooting does not seem entirely out of place in an age of technically advanced mass societies.
(Elias 2013: 225)The European civilizing process included, as discussed above, the internal pacification of modern societies, the parallel rise of constraints on aggressive impulses that operated through a deep-seated psychological revulsion against violence, and closer emotional bonds between members of the same society. Although largely unplanned, it was transformed into a conscious political project to reform society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Imperial doctrines most obviously captured the idea of a ‘civilizing mission’ in that period although many Enlightenment philosophers, in addition to condemning colonial cruelties, insisted that the process of civilization was far from complete within Europe itself. The ‘project of modernity’ captures the conception of unfinished business with respect to the establishment of social orders that promote human autonomy rather than slavish obedience to authority, that celebrate diversity and pluralism rather than bland uniformity and dogmatism, and that aim to embed ethical commitments to public reason in the rule of law (Devetak 1995). Inextricably connected with that ideal, for Kant at least, was the aspiration to extend the positive side of the civilizing process beyond territorial boundaries in the shape of close cooperation to advance towards perpetual peace. That endeavour was held to be realistic rather than utopian because of what Kant regarded as evidence of growing sympathy between specific social strata whose lives were increasingly intertwined by transnational commercial links and also because of the moral outrage that the ‘enlightened’ felt on learning about cruelties to colonized peoples.
The most flattering of European self-images held that further advances in civilization were more or less guaranteed although, as noted earlier, philosophers including Kant believed that progress could be reversed and that ‘nothing straight [could] be constructed from such warped wood as that which man is made of’ (Kant 1991 [1784a]: 46–7). From that perspective, there was nothing in the civilizing process itself that posed a major threat to continuing progress. The lurking threat was the ‘animal’ within human nature that civilization constantly battled against and might never completely subdue (Freud 1939: ch. 7).
6 - Cruelty and Compassion in the Age of Empire
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In 1798, as Napoleon set off for Egypt, he shouted to his troops: ‘Soldiers, you are undertaking a conquest with incalculable consequences for civilisation’. Unlike the situation when the concept was formed, from now on nations came to consider the process of civilisation as completed within their own societies; they came to see themselves as bearers of an existing or finished civilisation to others, as standard-bearers of expanding civilisation. Of the whole preceding process of civilisation nothing remained in their consciousness except a vague residue. Its outcome was taken simply as an expression of their higher gifts; the fact that, and the question of how, in the course of many centuries, civilised behaviour had been attained was of no interest. And the consciousness of their own superiority, the consciousness of this ‘civilisation’, from now on served at least those nations which become colonial conquerors, and therefore a kind of upper class to large sections of the non-European world, as a justification of their rule, to the same degree that earlier the ancestors of the concept of civilisation, politesse and civilité, had served the courtly-aristocratic upper class as a justification of theirs.
(Elias 2012: 57; italics in original)In the above citation, Elias described a relatively late phase in the process in which first Christian international society and then the members of the European states-system asserted the right to civilize ‘backward’ peoples. Those attitudes were part of the broader movement towards civility and civilization in Western Europe. As noted in a previous chapter, societies did not first develop the practices of civility within their territorial borders and only then reflect on their significance for relations with other peoples. European feelings of cultural superiority and repugnance towards various non-European social practices were not manifestations of a completed civilizing process: they were critical elements in the formation of ‘civilized’ self-images. From the beginning, the idea of civilization ‘which plays down the national differences between peoples’ and stresses ‘what is common to all human beings’ or ‘should be’ from the standpoint of its self-appointed ‘bearers’, gave ‘expression to the continuously expansionist tendency of colonizing groups’ (Elias 2012: 17).
Index
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