Since the emergence of a European consciousness from about the sixteenth century, the question has been frequently posed as to the meaning of Europe. This was bound to be a contested matter, and since then, many definitions of Europe have been controversial. For some, Europe is a political project, while for others it is a civilizational heritage that has been principally realized in different national forms. There is also little agreement on the geographical limits of Europe and how geography relates to culture and politics. It has often been noted that Europe is a peninsula of Asia, but where Europe ends and Asia begins cannot be answered by geography alone. The large expanse of land that lies between both was the way through which the peoples of Europe arrived in the great migrations from Asia over thousands of years. Geography unites more than it divides and thus does not offer a ready-made natural barrier that might be the basis of a definition. The narrow isthmus that separates Europe from Africa at the straits of Gibraltar once made possible an Islamic civilization that occupied the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea, but in later times was seen as a frontier between ‘continents’. The notion of Europe as a continent is itself a construction that is not based on a geographical landmass that is self-defining. 1 Such definitions are cultural creations of history. The allure of the idea of Europe in part resides in its cultural opacity than in the clarity of a geographical form or a historical explanation.
The overall geographical size of Europe, including the Western regions of the Slavonic-speaking area such as the Ukraine, is comparable to the size of China and is just a little smaller than Brazil, but arguably reveals a greater cultural diversity. There is no common language or religion binding Europe. Geographical factors do not define Europe, as they do not define most other large-scale countries or world regions. However, geographical factors are not irrelevant to history and culture. The fairly temperate climate and low altitude influenced patterns of migration, settlement and agriculture, prior to the industrial age. The continent is relatively accessible through land—lacking major natural barriers, such as unpassable mountain regions—and has benefited from being generally navigable by sea and by rivers. The Ural Mountains that supposedly mark the boundary of Europe and Asia in fact presented throughout history a lesser obstacle than the Alps that to a degree separated Northern and Southern Europe. The result was a relatively high degree of mutual knowledge of the existence of the different cultures and civilizations of Europe and Asia. This has prompted many geographers going back to Alexander von Humboldt to argue that there is no geographical distinction between Europe and Asia and that the former is a peninsula of Asia. Others have claimed that these notions are redundant and should be replaced by the wider category of Eurasia. However that would be to ignore the differences that do exist. While Asia covers a wider and more diverse areas and civilizations, Europe in contrast acquired a separate identity in the course of its shorter history. Since the sixteenth century, Europe has also been shaped by its interaction with the American continent.
The shape of Europe is closely related to the seas that surround it. No point in Western Europe is more than 350 km from the sea, a distance that is doubled for much of Central Europe and reaches some 11,000 km for the Russian plains (Mollat du Jourdin 1993: 4–6). Moreover, the course of Europe’s rivers facilitates links between the seas and the agriculturally rich hinterlands. The rivers of Europe—the Rhine, Elbe, Volga, Loire, Rhone—flowed through habitable and fertile land and made possible a high degree of mobility within the region and were the locations of many cities. They were the arteries through which European culture flowed and from where Europeans sailed to other parts of the world. If Europe is a peninsula of Asia, it is itself composed of peninsulas: the Iberian, Italian, Balkan, Jutland and Scandinavian. These peninsulas along with its archipelagos—the British Isles and the Aegean archipelago—and seas—the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Mediterranean—gave to Europe a form that gave shape to its history. It was waterways as much as land that shaped Europe.
While these factors did not lead to a common culture due to the differences between North and South, East and West, they provided environmental and spatial conditions for the formation of the diverse cultures that emerged in Europe and gave to it the character of a world historical region. It may be said that the geography of Europe provided a form that made possible a relatively high degree of fluidity and mobility of peoples, knowledge, cultures and artefacts.
More important than geography are the cultural and political definitions of Europe, which have changed over the course of history. The idea of Europe in the nineteenth century was very different from the early modern idea that arose with some of the first references to a European identity in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. All of these ideas of Europe were very different from the twentieth-century notion of Europe that came with the Cold War and the emergence of the European Union. Underlying these historical conceptions of Europe is an ever-changing geopolitical configuration shaped in space and in time by many forces. The resulting geopolitical configurations cannot be simply explained as an ‘idea’ or as a cultural construction that exists only as a symbolic imaginary. The interplay of power and culture within a geopolitical arena has often been interpreted as civilizational. It has generally been an implicit assumption that a civilizational form can be discerned in a long-term analysis of the geographical, cultural and political dimensions of European history. To speak of a civilization, or a civilizational heritage, involves the production of imaginary projections, but also entails more than mental constructions; it includes an institutional or societal order in which the material conditions of social life are produced and take on the character of a structure-forming process.
It is by no means self-evident what the term civilization means and what is European civilization. The term civilization is fraught with ideological associations of Western leadership, Eurocentrism. Kenneth Clark’s classic work, Civilization, in 1969, portrayed European civilization through the lens of the arts. The notion of European civilization has often been associated with ideas of the superiority of the West and other Eurocentric notions that have now been mostly discarded. In the nineteenth century, the notion of civilization, more or less equated with Europe, was generally defined in terms of distinctions based on civilization versus barbarism. In this definition, there could only be one civilization for the non-Western world was deemed incapable of civilization save in the adoption of Western Civilization. It was a common notion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that cultures were subordinate to civilization. Cultures were largely national and the diversity of cultures, it was believed, reflected the diversity of nations and peoples while underlying all these cultures was a unitary notion of civilization. Several cultures competed to be the true representative of civilization, which was a singular and universal condition. Since Hegel, it was often thought, too, that civilization first arose in the East, but due to the alleged decadence of oriental cultures, it declined and was resurrected by the cultures of the West. European civilization has generally been regarded as the equivalent of ‘Western Civilization’, which as a supposedly universal condition was more or less equated with modernity and hence the idea of what has been called ‘Western Civilization’ as the universal reference point for all cultures to be measured if not also judged. However, the notion of European civilization has generally been discussed since the early twentieth century in terms of a notion of decline, as in the work of Toynbee and Spengler. Indeed, the very notion of ‘decline’ seems now to be part of the idea of civilization. This was in part a reversal of the preoccupation with progress since the Enlightenment, but it still left open the question if something survived the decent into decline or if the origins of Europe could be revived in a reaffirmation of the European spirit.
Setting aside the now questionable equation of Europe with a singular notion of West, the idea of civilizations in the plural did not exist, for only culture could be plural—civilization was the universal dimension of culture. This tension between the universality of civilization and uniqueness of cultures lay at the centre of European Enlightenment thought, which celebrated reason, progress, science as well as the romantic pursuit of culture and national uniqueness. Since not every nation could be the greatest, the idea of cultural diversity was born. When historical and sociological scholarship finally recognized the plurality of civilizations, as in the pioneering work of classical sociologists such as Max Weber and the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, there was generally an implicit assumption of the uniqueness of the civilization that emerged within Europe. These scholars recognized the plurality of civilizations, but tended to see them as self-forming and separate from each other and based on relatively uniform cultures. In addition, even in cases where Eurocentrism was much less prevalent, teleological notions of a civilizational logic tended to prevail in studies of the non-Western world. In such accounts, influenced by modernization theory and the legacy of colonialism, it was generally assumed that the civilizations of the non-Western world would eventually adopt the Western model of modernity and in doing so would inherit the universalistic aspects of European civilization.
Clearly, such assumptions based on the distinction of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies can no longer be uncritically taken for granted. While much of the world has been influenced by European civilization, it is increasingly recognized that this undoubted fact has not led to the absolute universality of European civilization, which has itself been influenced by non-Western Civilizations. The contemporary world more than ever since the rise of the West from about the sixteenth century is a multi-civilizational order in which there are radically different projects of modernity, none of which are simply the adaptation of Europe’s route to modernity. The historical experience and the circumstances of the present day suggest the importance of a plural notion of civilizations as overlapping, entangled and hyphenated. Thus, the term civilization should be used in the plural rather than in the singular. European civilization thus owes its origin to a plurality of civilizations whose interactions produce specific fusions. This seems preferable to dismissing the use of the term civilization altogether, since if it were discarded, there would be no other term to capture related cultural orientations and historical formations among families of societies. Rather than deny the existence of a civilizational heritage, it is more instructive to try to understand it and to do so in a way that is relevant to the present day.
Some Considerations in Defining Civilizations
A critical and reflexive view of the idea of civilization suggests a condition that is not underpinned by a specific cultural, political or geographical set of given facts that are somehow prior to history or provide a template for later experiments. Civilizations are ongoing structure-forming processes which create the very elements that define them. They are not immutable or predetermined, but broadly defined cultural orientations that shape otherwise diverse societies and are continually changed as a result of new interpretations. The upshot of this is an anti-essentialist notion of civilization as a transformative process in which various elements and dynamics shape a broad spectrum of societies in terms of their cultural orientations and institutional patterns. In this view, civilizations are not to be defined as closed systems locked in conflict with each other and based on primordial cultural codes or an origin that gives to history an enduring form. Civilizations have also been shaped in inter-civilizational encounters: they are not self-positing. Virtually, every major world civilization has been influenced by another civilization: Japanese civilization incorporated elements of Chinese civilization which itself appropriated Buddhist culture from Indian civilization. For these reasons, there is no pure or self-contained culture or civilization. Such cultural entanglements also made possible the emergence of European civilization. Any account of civilizational history will have to address the inter-civilizational dimension as much as the intra-civilizational: Europe was shaped through relations with the non-European world as much as it was shaped from the cultures within (what was to become) Europe. Civilizations develop in nonlinear ways: there is no one simple path from barbarism to civilization and modernity, nor is there a general descent from civilization into barbarism. Accordingly, what is needed is a multidimensional concept of civilizational patterns, encounters and subsequent entanglements.
In this account, the logic of the encounter with the culture of the Other is a key dimension of civilizational history. Such encounters take a diversity of forms, ranging from adaptations and borrowings, large-scale institutional transfers, translations, migrations of elites or of whole populations, repudiations, reinterpretations, even violent clashes. Colonialism, since the sixteenth century, was of course one of the main ways in which Europe encountered the rest of the world. This did not exclude the possibility of more cosmopolitan encounters with the Other. Even before anything like a European consciousness emerged, Spanish colonization of the New World established a system of domination in which European civilization became embroiled with racism and cultural superiority. Cosmopolitan resistances and different forms of knowledge also took shape against this wider colonial culture that was to shape the course of European history. Together these currents form part of the European civilizational heritage.
One of the most significant sites of civilizational encounters were universities. Universities throughout the Middle Ages were one of the most important places where other civilizations and cultures were studied. The process at work here can be understood as neither a matter of a clash of civilizations nor a dialogue: universities were sites where conflicting interpretations of the world became the subject of scholarly interest before they diffused in the wider society. But more generally, as will be argued in later chapters, much of the Renaissance and Enlightenment involved the interaction of civilizations and thus presupposed the possibility of dialogue and learning. The fact that the conflict between civilizations and their internal units was often more consequential than unity does not detract from the fact that civilizations were formed in part out of their mutual engagement with each other (see, e.g., Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004; Mozaffari 2002; Weingrow 2010).
So what is a civilization? 2 Four broad features define a civilization: a geopolitical configuration, institutional structures in which material life and power are embedded, cultural orientations and worldviews, and diasporic movements of peoples. As a geopolitical configuration, a civilization has a territorial dimension, which may be a world historical region. This does not have to be a very specifically defined territory, such as the territory of a state, and can be quite open. Most of the civilizations of the world have had a territorial basis, however undefined their frontiers have been, and have been associated with key cities. Indeed, most, if not all, of the major civilizations of the world were at some point in their history shaped by an imperial power and had an expanding border. An exception is the Judaic civilization, which was a diasporic civilization. But even this, although lacking an imperial centre, had in one of its later traditions, namely Zionism, a special relation to a specific territory. Second, civilizations also have a basis in material life and entail institutional structures in which res...