Is there such a Thing as "Western Civilzation" ?

[MrDibble]

They do have an Antarctic presence as well…

[Tamerlane]

@Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil

Yes, I feel the same way about the Czech.

In the sense that they feel Western to you or not? Bohemia has been associated with the East Frankish kingdom since the 9th century and was an HRE member state from the opening of the 11th. Similarly the folks we call the Slovenes today have been under the imperial thumb for a like period of time. Peoples like the Sorbs and Kashubians are remnants of long absorbed/conquered Slavic peoples in the west.

For that matter in what direction did the Catholic crowns of Poland and Croatia gaze? Or the Hungarian crown of St. Stephen( which included Croatia from the 12th century )? Their politics were altogether entwined with what you consider western states for much of their history. For me they are hard to extricate and I think I have a tendency to put far more weight on this shared regional history of Europe.

presence in Africa or Oceania and only a relatively short-lived one in America. Colonialism may be colonialsim but was Russia’s as global as Spain’s, Britain’s or France’s ?

Ask admiral Rozhestvensky ;). The Scramble for Africa occurred in the 19th century, Oceania was virtually irrelevant to world politics( sorry, Oceanians ). Russia’s experience IMHO was more similar than different to other major powers in terms of the politics of expansionism.

[Hector_St_Clare]

@Les_Espaces_Du_Sommeil

I’ve always been facinated by the fact that, very broadly speaking, the Catholicism/Protestantism divide fits nicely over the Latin/Germanic cultural areas. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, though I can’t come up with an explanation.

Still, I agree that dividing European peoples into Mediterranean and Nordic strands makes sense. The real question is : are these different worldviews fundamental (civilizational, so to speak) or mere variations on a deeper common background ? I suppose that, given your answer, you’d pick the former. I’d lean towards the latter.

This is rapidly becoming less so the case, with the rapid spread of Protestantism in Latin America. There’s at least one Central American country (possibly Honduras, but I forget which) where Catholics are no longer a majority, and some Central American countries will be plurality Protestant before long (I think some sub-national regions already are).

[Hector_St_Clare]

@Tamerlane

Russia, like Manchu China, expanded over land rather than over sea. But they expanded enormously and colonialism is colonialism :).

Russian Central Asia wasn’t really a colony in the same sense that India or Kenya were colonies. (I wouldn’t say that the Chinese outlying areas were colonies either).

Russia could be extremely brutal in its administration of central Asia, but unlike with the British in Africa, for example, the central Asian territories were integral parts of the Russian state, they weren’t resource extraction zones / markets set up to enrich the center at the expense of the periphery. During the Soviet era, at least, Russia probably spent more on the Central Asian republics than it received from them. The Central Asian republics, at the time they won independence in 1991, were at least semi-industrialized, which is something you can’t really say for any of the British, French or German former colonies in Africa & Asia. I don’t endorse the Russian conquest of Muslim Central Asia, but I still think it’s worth distinguishing the Western European Age of Empire from all the various historical conquests that had gone before them, there was something genuinely new and different going on.

[Hector_St_Clare]

@Captain_Amazing

I don’t know. Tell a Czech that his society has been on the periphery of Western civilization and see how he reacts.

I don’t really think so. In two of the Visegrad countries (I think it was Poland and the Czechs, but it might have been Poland and Hungary), a majority of people currently agree with the statement “Western values are a threat to our country”. That wouldn’t make any sense if Poles and Czechs saw themselves as ‘western’. Some do, obviously, but I’d suggest that most don’t. I’ll try to pull up the Pew survey to that effect.

[Hector_St_Clare]

@chaika

At my university students are required to take courses in a number of “general education” categories, one of which is Western Civilization. I often teach a course on Dostoevsky which is listed under this heading. It makes me smile to think of Dostoevsky’s probable apoplectic reaction to being named a representative of Western civilization.

LOL!
But yes, that’s kind of the point of my skepticism that Western Civilization really exists in a meaningful sense. I think it’s a term that, like “Judeo-Christian”, conceals more than it reveals and is usually invoked for ideological reasons.

[Ramira]

@Hector_St_Clare

Russian Central Asia wasn’t really a colony in the same sense that India or Kenya were colonies. (I wouldn’t say that the Chinese outlying areas were colonies either).

Russia could be extremely brutal in its administration of central Asia, but unlike with the British in Africa, for example, the central Asian territories were integral parts of the Russian state, they weren’t resource extraction zones / markets set up to enrich the center at the expense of the periphery. During the Soviet era, at least, Russia probably spent more on the Central Asian republics than it received from them. The Central Asian republics, at the time they won independence in 1991, were at least semi-industrialized, which is something you can’t really say for any of the British, French or German former colonies in Africa & Asia. I don’t endorse the Russian conquest of Muslim Central Asia, but I still think it’s worth distinguishing the Western European Age of Empire from all the various historical conquests that had gone before them, there was something genuinely new and different going on.

By this mode of thinking, then the Algeria was not a colony.

Which would be a surprise to them.

The patterns of the soviets from the Stalin period forward in the metropole culture and language imposition do not really look so different from the French methods.

The soviet colonial rule of the central asians and the industrial investment, fine but it does not look different even in timing from the late colonial investment of the Europeans in the higher performing colonies. and the soviet colonial extraction certainly is very exemplified by the “new lands” cotton etc. mono cultures that damage the environment to this day. Your Sovietphilia blinds you to very common patterns.

although I agree you point about how the W. European centricism in the assertion of the Western Civilization is disortive like the instrumentalization of the ‘judeo-christian’…

[AK84]

How about Western Civilizations? Like Islamic Civilizations, or Far Eastern Civilzations?

[MrDibble]

@Hector_St_Clare

The Central Asian republics, at the time they won independence in 1991, were at least semi-industrialized, which is something you can’t really say for any of the British, […] former colonies in Africa

Say what, now?

[AK84]

@MrDibble

Say what, now?

In most ways South Africa was a White Dominion. So that’s different.

[MrDibble]

@AK84

In most ways South Africa was a White Dominion. So that’s different.

That’s not a distinction Hector drew. And irrelevant, anyway - “Central Asia” isn’t exactly a hotbed of Brown people either.