Introduction
The legacy of those transformations is evident to this day. For example, from 2002 the Congress of the Chinese Communist Party has used the term jingshen wenming to support its vision of a socialist ‘spiritual civilization’ and also to honour ‘civilized households’ and ‘civilized work units’. The language reflects earlier changes in which traditional Confucian categories were reinterpreted and complemented by conceptual inventions in order to promote China’s reorientation to the realities of rapidly changing global power balances (Nyíri 2006; Wang 1991). See also the discussion of Chinese depictions of an ecological civilization on pp. 213–14.
In the last years of his life, blindness and physical frailty meant that Elias dictated his final works to student assistants. For further details, see Richard Kilminster’s introduction to Elias (2011).
Reference has been made to the decivilizing process that occurred under National Socialism. Elias used the term in its etic sense to refer to the erosion of constraints on violence and the reduction of levels of emotional identification between people. Of course, for many Germans the rise of National Socialism constituted a breakdown of civilization in the emic sense. It represented total moral collapse. Regarding the rise of parliamentary government, many participants believed that they were creating more civilized political arrangements. They were employing civilization in the emic sense whereas Elias’ comments on its civilizing qualities relied on the etic meaning of the term.
The decision to emancipate the concept of civilization from its ideological connotations also reflected the influence of Freud’s analysis of the connections between civilization and internal forms of repression that were the source of assorted psychological disorders (see Elias 2014 for a sympathetic but critical interpretation of Freud’s writings). In the conclusion to the study of the civilizing process, Elias posed the question of whether people can construct ways of life in which the self-restraints that are essential for the functioning of every society are no longer as repressive and joyless as in the current era (Elias 2012 [1939]: 486ff). Far from embracing a progressivist analysis of civilized societies, Elias stressed the complex psychological demands, shackles, fears and anxieties that are linked with the compulsions of civilization.
For further discussion of the idea of figuration, see Elias 2009b. Elias developed the concept to break free from the traditional sociological focus on ‘society’. The concept refers to any set of interdependencies between people extending from local to ‘national’ and international or transnational networks.
In an interview that was conducted in the late 1960s, Adorno (2002: 15) supported a position on social inquiry that seems very close to Elias’s standpoint. He maintained that ‘theory is much more capable of having practical consequences owing to the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected itself to practice from the start’. Elias used the language of greater detachment in the quest for reality-congruent knowledge rather the somewhat static concept of objectivity.
Chapter 1
See www.reuters.com.
See www.wirenews.co.uk.
See whc.unesco.org.
See www.haaretz.com.
See https://www.theguardian.com > World > Afghanistan.
See https://www.theguardian.com › World › Iraq.
Elias frequently stressed the importance of the means of orientation for human groups but he did not define the term. The concept referred to ‘the symbolic reference points … people draw upon in order to navigate themselves successfully in the complex and shifting inter-group relations of society’ (see Elias 2011: 120n8, editor’s comment).
The relevant internal memoranda were leaked in 2004 resulting in heated national debates and robust international condemnation (Barnes 2016).
See https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/2004/12/31/op-olc-v028-p0297_0.pdf (p 304).
Recent discussions of US-initiated ‘targeted killings’ have analyzed official claims that such actions do not violate norms that prohibit assassination. They have noted efforts to stay within ‘cosmopolitan norms’ by preventing the death or injury of innocent civilians. There has been no parallel to the torture debate where the two sides of the national moral code came into conflict (Pratt 2019: 732, 740). Suffice it to add that the relationship between the defence of targeted killings and the civilizing process warrants further investigation.
Chapter 2
Elias (2013a:193) observed that one ‘cannot fully understand the development of Germany’ without considering its ‘position in the inter-state framework and correspondingly in the power and status hierarchies of states. It is impossible here
I am grateful to Hidemi Suganami for many discussions on this point. This is not the place, however, to attempt to explain the differences between the causal analysis of law-like regularities and Elias’s method which was predicated on the challenging supposition that ‘processes can only be understood in terms of processes’ (Elias 2007: 20).
It is important to add that, contrary to some interpretations (see Thomas 2018: 21), Elias did not argue that civilized peoples were uniformly more restrained than earlier peoples or ‘so-called primitives’.
Not that Mill (2002 [1859]: 487) believed that the ‘civilized’ were entitled to treat ‘barbarians’ exactly as they pleased. ‘The universal rules of morality between man and man’, he argued, could not be casually brushed aside in the relations between ‘a civilized and a barbarous government’ (487).
The Description de l’Egypte was the result of the monumental analysis of Ancient Egypt which was undertaken by teams of specialists from various disciplines, including archaeology, geography and musicology, who travelled to Egypt with Napoleon’s armed forces (Godlewska 1995).
As a measure of its importance in disseminating ideas about civil conduct, Erasmus’s treatise, On the Civility of Boys, was translated into over 20 languages and appeared in several editions following its first publication in 1530. Elias selected the work to explain how civilized standards spread across the upper social strata and across state borders with the result that more and more literate people became bound together in the same expanding civilization.
Clear parallels exist with expansions of the ‘danger zone’ that reflected a growing awareness that ‘intimate contact may be physically dangerous – dangerous not in the sense that others may suddenly draw a knife or a pistol, but that they may be the carriers of an infectious disease’ (Goudsblom 1986: 164, italics in original). Goudsblom (1986: 166) also refers to the convention that, when in the company of healthy persons, lepers had to ‘speak against the wind because of the foul air they exhumed, and they had to maintain a distance of six feet’. I am grateful to Alex Mack for drawing my attention to this article.
In a revealing contrast, US visitors to Japan in the late 19th-century admired the value attached to personal hygiene and to high levels of civility and politeness while condemning the ‘barbarism’ of concubinage and prostitution (Henning 2000: ch. 2).
Such admonitions are not merely of historical interest. Prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese Civilization Committee urged people to refrain from behaving in ways that Western visitors would find offensive (Coonan, The Independent, 26 July 2008). ‘Anti-spitting campaigns and manners classes’ were at the heart of a state-driven ‘civilizing mission’ (Nyíri 2006: 90). The episode demonstrates the enduring global ramifications of European civilized standards regarding the management of bodily functions. Government efforts to advertise compliance with the requisite standards of self-restraint can be interpreted in different ways – as a genuine attempt to promote greater consideration for others and/or as a quest to win the recognition as a civilized people that was withheld in the 19th century when most Europeans looked down on Chinese ‘barbaric’ practices.
Japanese unease at the greater occupational opportunities for women in the United States and their more prominent role in the public domain led to domestic legislation in 1890 that virtually banned women from participating in the political sphere (Benesch 2015: 255–6).
Chapter 3
Elias argued that some of the problems in the relations between societies arise because of different conceptions of the standards of self-restraint that should be observed in the conduct of foreign policy. Greater dialogue, he added, was needed to explore the prospects for future inter-state agreements (Elias 2012 [1939]: 453, n19). Those insightful comments have important implications for the idea of a global civilizing process; this will be explored in Chapter 7. Steele (2019: introduction) emphasizes the extent to which relations between states often boil down to discussions and debates about necessary standards of restraint.
A striking example of the change in orientations towards African peoples was Hegel’s characterization of sub-Saharan Africa as a ‘land of childhood … enveloped in the dark mantle of Night’ and populated by ‘natural man in his completely wild and untamed state’. The ‘want of self-control’ which distinguished the ‘character of the Negroes’ was evident in cannibalism, enslavement and warfare; these displayed ‘the most reckless inhumanity and disgusting barbarism’ (Hegel 1956: 91ff). Steep power gradients that did not exist in the period when Europeans first encountered the empire in Mali underpinned the open stigmatization of peoples that were presumed to lack the Europeans’ achievement of civilized self-restraint.
Not that the two cases were identical. Following a court martial, Smith was formally retired from the army for issuing orders that (according to the official verdict) subordinates were not meant to take literally (see, however, Welch 1974).
Condemning the ‘disastrous effects of even slight loosening of the bonds of restraint’ which occurred when the Allied troops entered Peking (Beijing) in 1900 in the search for ‘souvenirs’, one author attached less importance to the rights of the Chinese people to be spared suffering on account of the Europeans’ ‘innate sense of decency’ than to the collapse of the military discipline that was expected of ‘civilized’ armies (Colby 1927: 286).
Similar dichotomies can be found in later periods. For example, the classical Chinese tribute system consisted of an inner zone, in which China, Japan, Vietnam and Korea respected high levels of civility, and an outer zone, in which relations with the South East Asian polities generally complied with basis standards of self-restraint. Wars with nomadic ‘savage’ groups were commonplace prior to their incorporation in the Chinese empire. I am grateful to John Hobson for this point.
The following discussion draws on Linklater (2016: 385, 393ff).
From time to time, such sentiments find expression in official statements by Western leaders, an example being President Trump’s speech in the aftermath of the 4 April 2017 air strike on Syrian military facilities in response to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons. The speech implored all ‘civilized nations’ to join the United States in ending ‘barbaric’ attacks such as the Syrian government’s use of nerve gas against ‘innocent civilians’ which blatantly ‘violated its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention’ (see www.theguardian.com › Opinion › Syria).
The words ‘The Great War for Civilization, 1914–19’ appeared on the reverse of the Inter-Allied Victory Medal, awarded to those who had served in the First World War (see http://www.forces-war-records.co.uk).
There have been interesting parallels in the recent period. Noteworthy were media representations of Lynndie England whose role in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked large sections of the US public (Tucker and Triantafyllos 2008). Also significant for the present discussion, and specifically for the discourse of ‘the minority of the best’, was President Bush’s statement at a news conference on 6 May 2004 that photographic images of prisoner abuse did not represent the ‘true nature and heart of America’ (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=72619).
Other cases include the trial of Captain Robert Semrau, who was dismissed from the Canadian army in October 2010 – but spared a prison sentence – following a guilty verdict for killing a wounded insurgent in Afghanistan two years earlier (see http://www.macleans/ca/news/canada-captain-robert-semrau). More recently, on 4 January 2017, a military court in Israel found Sergeant Azaria guilty of manslaughter for killing a wounded Palestinian assailant (see https://www.theguardian.com › World › Israel debate in Israel).
See www.telegraph.co.uk/news/defence.10517321 for further details of the original legal case against ‘Marine A’.
Recent discussions in the United Kingdom about whether the government’s decision to withdraw citizenship status from persons who left the country to join ‘IS’ should be condoned on national security grounds or criticized as a breach of international law is an additional example of how the tensions within a contradictory moral code arise unexpectedly.
Chapter 4
An interesting point of comparison is the study of the French colonial state in Cambodia in Broadhurst et al 2015.
Such feelings of revolution could be reciprocated. Greenblatt (1982: 62) refers to an Amerindian’s disgust at the European practice of using handkerchiefs to collect and carry about mucus. ‘If thou likest that filth’, the person is quoted as saying, ‘give me thy handkerchief and I will soon fill it’.
Many contemporary travelogues, it has been argued, perpetuate dichotomies between former ‘civilized’ zones of safety which have been destroyed by political upheaval in ‘barbarous’ regions that had once been under colonial rule. They draw on earlier narratives about the linkages between imperialism, pacification and civilization (Lisle 2006: ch 4).
Those tests of ‘civilized’ status are not simply of historical interest. They influenced, in modified form, official assessments by the US Bush administration of the legal standing of the Taliban government in the aftermath of 9/11. The 9 January 2002 memorandum on the Application of Treaties and Laws to Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees prepared by the Office of the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the General Counsel in the Department of Defense ruled that Afghanistan failed the test of statehood because it did not exercise administrative control of a ‘clearly defined territory and population’, was clearly incapable of ‘acting effectively to conduct foreign policy and to fulfil international obligations’, and lacked the requisite recognition of the ‘international community’(Greenberg and Dratel 2005: 53ff). The point applies to all ‘failed states’ in the dominant contemporary Western narratives.
Britain’s decision in late 1784 to permit the gunner of the British ship, the ‘Lady Hughes’, to be tried by the Chinese authorities would be a turning-point in Anglo-Chinese relations. Local officials demanded his trial for causing the death of two Chinese nationals in the course of firing an official salute. The verdict of punishment by strangling led the British to insist on the resented practice of extraterritoriality which was formalized by the August 1842 Treaty of Nanking (see Benton 2002: 247ff who stresses British opposition to a legal system which consisted entirely of criminal law and took no account of the intentions of the accused when determining the appropriate sentence). The ‘Lady Hughes’ incident has been described as critical in the formation of Western views of Chinese ‘barbarism’ and in the justification of a ‘civilizing mission’ to introduce ‘the [British] ‘rule of law’ in the country (Chen 2009, especially p 44).
Chen (2009: 21ff) describes actual Chinese judicial procedures and refers to the fact that, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many Europeans commented positively on the Chinese legal system while condemning the severity and arbitrariness of the criminal justice system in many European societies. Judgements changed radically in a later phase of the civilizing process.
Brockman-Hawe, in an undated paper, argues that the great European powers did not shy away from resorting to punishment by beheading, as occurred in the case of Chinese officials who were held responsible for the massacre of Westerns in Paoting-Fu during the Boxer Rebellion.
Macartney, whose comments on Chinese manners and customs were noted earlier, stressed the ‘infernal distortion’ of foot binding but he immediately stated his disinclination to ‘despise and ridicule other nations’ because of minor points of difference regarding ‘manners and dress’ given that ‘we can very nearly match them with similar follies and absurdities of our own’ (Macartney 2004: 187). Revealing was the response by Sir Ernest Satow (British Ambassador to Japan for over two decades from the early 1860s and again in the last few years of the 19th century) to comments that it was ‘shameful’ that he had witnessed such a ‘disgusting exhibition’ as the hara-kiri, a punishment that the Japanese authorities had imposed on a military commander who had ordered troops to open fire on foreigners. The punishment, Satow (1921: 346–7) observed, had been integral to a ‘most decent and decorous ceremony’ which was ‘far more respectable than what our countrymen were in the habit of producing for the entertainment of the public in the front of Newgate prison’. I am grateful to Hidemi Suganami for drawing this work to my attention.
Chapter 5
In the 1968 postscript to his 1939 work, Elias (2012 [1939]: 475, note 6) commented on ‘repeatedly’ having ‘to resist the temptation to change the original text in accordance with the present state of my knowledge’ but did not elaborate.
Elias discussed those features of established–outsider relations with respect to ‘Levantinism’ which described the ‘mimic man’, the ‘Orientalised European’ or ‘dragoman’ of Syro-Lebanese descent (see Halim 2013: 200ff for further discussion). The key dynamics have been explored in more recent studies of the Indian concept of babu, which was used to mock those who behaved in the manner of the ‘English gentleman’, and also in analyses of the Turkish notion of alafranga, which ridiculed those who remade themselves in the image of ‘French civility’ (Wigen 2015: 116ff).
A recurring theme in that period was that Eastern Europe as a whole occupied ‘the curious space between civilization and barbarism’ (Wolff 1994: 23).
See Stivachtis (2015) for a discussion of President Yeltsin’s speeches in February 1992 which announced the government’s intention to transform Russia into a ‘modern civilized state’ that was restored to full membership of the international ‘community of civilized nations’. As Stivachtis argues, the twin objectives of democratization and state-initiated transition to market arrangements signalled the desire to govern in compliance with modern liberal-democratic ‘standards of civilization’. Linde (2016) discusses the prominence of the narrative of civilization or ‘civilizational nationalism’ in the period since Putin came to power, a standpoint that was partly influenced by Huntington’s argument about the increased importance of civilizational identification in recent times. Coker (2019: 67ff, ch 7) discusses the robust anti-universalism that lies at the heart of Putin’s image of Russia as a ‘civilizational state’, a concept that can be used to contain groups that are committed to the civilizational ‘critique of the nation’. As noted earlier in connection with the US ‘war on terror’, the idea of civilization remains an important weapon in attempts to influence or control domestic ‘power chances’ (see the discussion on pp. 38–39).
Western assumptions that Russia remains incompletely ‘European’ or ‘Western’ – a form of ‘oriental despotism’ and therefore less than fully ‘civilized’ – have repeatedly clashed with more positive Western characterizations. Reflecting the former standpoint was the statement in the British House of Commons on 21 January 2016 by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, following the official inquiry which concluded that the Russian state was probably involved in the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, a former member of the Russian secret service. The Commons’ statement linked the condemnatory language of civilization with the older discourse of the legal responsibilities associated with membership of international society when it accused the Russian government of ‘a blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of international law and of civilized behaviour’. Employing similar themes, on 15 March 2018 the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, condemned Russia’s alleged use of a nerve agent against Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia earlier that month as ‘a breach of international norms and agreements’ that had ‘no place in a civilized world’ (see https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_152678.htm ).
A similar strategy was adopted by Greek nationalists who advanced the case for liberation from alien Ottoman rule and for membership of the society of states by proclaiming that classical Greece was the birthplace of European civilization, an idea that flourished in the age of the Enlightenment (Herzfeld 1995; Stivachtis 1998: 106ff; Neumann and Welsh 1991; Ejdus 2014). The 1822 Greek provisional government promoted its claim for emancipation from Ottoman rule by contending that Greece was part of a superior Christian civilization (Stivachtis 1998: 155). Appeals to shared ancestry surfaced later in Turkey under Atatürk’s rule when Turkish was described as the taproot of the Indo-European languages and contemporary Turks were portrayed as the descendants of ancient civilizations such as Sumer and Egypt and depicted as
An interesting parallel as far as ‘borrowed colonialism’ is concerned was the invitation to British and French consuls to witness the 1869 project of pacifying the Bedouin in Jordan (Deringil 2003: 340). Bedouin submission had the desired effect of displaying the effectiveness of Ottoman state institutions to the foreign representatives of civilization.
The Ottoman Empire was not the only state-organized society in the Middle East to look towards Japan for inspiration. Iran in the late 19th century also attempted to learn from Japan’s success as a ‘student of civilization’ in its effort to catch up with European educational standards. The Society of Learning, established in Tehran in 1898, was designed to fund secular schools that would promote the new ideals of civilization which Persian intellectuals translated as mada-niyyat (Pistor-Hatam 1996).
The idea of ‘reaching the standards of contemporary civilization’ became the ‘unofficial mantra’ of the Revolution (see Dösemeci 2013: 3 who adds that the ruling elite that initiated the application to join the European Economic Community as of 30 July 1959 argued that membership would represent the consummation of Atatürk’s vision to ‘raise Turkey to the level of contemporary civilization’). Opponents of the civilizational standpoint invoked a ‘nationalist logic’ that protested against the continuation of humiliating ‘Ottoman capitulations’ in the form of Turkey’s quasi-colonial subordination to Western market relations. Their reaction to government policies that were deemed to perpetuate feelings of inferiority and to damage national pride stressed the existence of multiple civilizations, none of which had the right to measure others’ achievements against supposedly universal criteria (Dösemeci 2013: 4ff, also chs 2–3). The European Union, on the other hand, consistently rejected Turkey’s request for membership by arguing that it failed to meet the relevant ‘standards of civilization’ regarding human rights (Casanova 2006; Wigen 2014; Bilgic 2015).
Chapter 6
In an important intellectual movement in France around the end of the First World War, scholars responded to increasingly nationalist, anti-Western sentiments with the call for a more detached understanding of other civilizations. The objective was to widen horizons before mounting resentment at colonial efforts ‘to smother native life’ with ‘European civilizational imports’ mutated into the politics of hatred (Said 2003: 248–9). The approach of Durkheim and Mauss (1971) [1913] was one illustration of a growing interest in the comparative analysis of civilizations (and an important step towards the investigation of different civilizing processes in the etic sense of the term).
Those developments found expression in the notion of a ‘dialogue between civilizations’ which the Iranian President, Muhammad Khatami, advocated in the 1990s (Lynch 2000; Michael and Pettito 2009). The dialogic image embodied the ‘progressive humanist’ task of promoting mutual tolerance and respect through a greater understanding of different civilizations (Palumbo-Liu 2002). An important ethical ideal rested, however, on a process-reducing concept with limited explanatory value. Involvement in specific moral and political objectives obstructed the more detached inquiry that is the key to practical success (see p. 22).
The racial revolt and the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination have been described as illustrations of how ‘the Global South civilized the West’ (Jensen 2016: 278–8). The case for a new standard of civilization in the UN General Assembly debates on the Convention included the claim by the Colombian and Senegalese delegates that ‘the existence of racial barriers is repugnant to the ideals of any civilized society’ and typical of the ‘savage society’ in which the principle that ‘might is right’ dominates (Jensen 2016: 119).
Singh (2015: 200) observes that a series of 19th-century conflicts from the Crimean War through to the 1879 Anglo-Zulu colonial war led prominent Indian nationalists to ask if ‘so much death and destruction and killing of innocent human beings was the basic meaning of [the] civilization’ they were expected to admire and imitate.
The question necessarily arises of whether Elias’s analysis of the civilizing process was a variant on the secularization thesis that dominated the classical sociology tradition. On one interpretation, he advanced a nuanced version of the thesis, one that concentrated on changing fantasy-reality balances in civilized societies. There is no space to discuss this matter here. The issues are considered in more detail elsewhere (Linklater, in preparation).
See www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/Americas/3088936.stm. The larger historical context is worth noting, namely the revolutionary critique of parallels between the British colonial establishment and the corrupt practices of the Roman Empire which informed a three-tiered standard of civilization in which the United States was placed above the middle tier of European powers and the lowest rung of non-Western peoples (see Cha 2015 on Jeffersonian exceptionalism; also Mennell 2007: 25ff).
By way of example, long-standing dichotomies between the admirably ‘industrious’ peoples of Northern Europe and the stigmatized ‘undisciplined’ and ‘passionate’ societies in the Southern or South Eastern regions surfaced in media representations of Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis (Bakic-Hayden and Hayden 1992). Central was the argument that ruling elites with the responsibility for managing a modern capitalist economy lacked the requisite ‘civilized’ levels of foresight, responsibility and self-restraint (Herzfeld 1995; also Haro 2014).
Significantly, the Chinese government maintained at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2009 that the 2008 global financial crisis was the outcome of failures to regulate markets that flowed from the absence of the requisite ‘self-discipline’, an interesting formulation given the importance of self-constraint and control in Elias’s analysis of the European civilizing process (see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/.../WEF;2009-Russia-and-China-blam).
One can only speculate about whether the relevant doctrines will permit or preclude the civilizational ‘critique of the nation’ (see Coker 2019: 124ff). The issue will warrant close analysis, assuming that national loyalties are intertwined with claims to global leadership and associated affirmations of special responsibilities for protecting human civilization.
