Civilizations and the Three Historical Regions

Having outlined our general thesis about the importance of the separation of spheres in regime development, we move on to the three concrete theses about the evolution of the post-communist region. Thesis B, C and D concern the pre-communist, communist and post-communist times, respectively, pointing out the conditions and events that had the most effect on the level of spheres of social actions in the region.

Thesis B. In pre-communist times, the separation of spheres of social action followed civiliza-tional boundaries. While all were feudal states at the time, countries that belonged to Western Christianity featured most separation, followed by less separation in the Eastern Orthodox and the least separation in the Islamic and Sinic civilizations. The lack of separation was represented by a series of interrelated phenomena, which were present with different strength in different civilizations.

As Karl Polanyi explains in The Great Transformation, communality and reciprocity played an essential role in pre-modern economies and it took the Industrial Revolution to separate the sphere of market action from that of communal and political action, leading to the devel-opment of capitalist markets in the modern sense.⁷ Later on, checks on monarchs and property rights protection created the boundary conditions for free trade and entrepreneurship, which

6 Kozák believes this is the case because of more “Eastern” than “Western” set of values, whereas Csizmadia argues the weak nation-state and democratic traditions, the weak social organizational power of liberalism and the weak social cohesion and citizenship, resulting from the lack of political education, are the factors that make liberal democracy in Hungary “baseless.” See, respectively, Kozák, “Western Social Development with an Eastern Set of Values?”; Csizmadia, A magyar politikai fejlődés logikája [The logic of Hungarian political development].

7 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 45–70.

1.3. Thesis B: The Separation of Spheres Followed Civilizational Boundaries • 35 allowed private capitalists largely independent from the political sphere to emerge, especially

after the 18^th century and the dusk of mercantilism.⁸ However, this transformation and the separation of the spheres of social action was particular to Western civilization. As a con-sequence, the 19^th century saw a “great divergence” of the West from the East,⁹ where absolute monarchs enjoyed a monopoly on land, legal protection of private property was weak and industrialization took place, lagging several decades behind, as a politically-driven process.¹⁰

This state of affairs amounts to the rudimentary or lack of separation of the spheres of social action in Eastern civilizations at the turn of the 20^th century. Thesis B argues this can be traced back to civilizational specificities, and indeed, it was Western civilization that allowed the process of separation to start in the first place, long before the Industrial Revolution. We divide the post-communist region by civilizational “boundar-ies” the same way Huntington does in his famous The Clash of Civilizations (Figure 1.1).¹¹ However, our understanding of “civilization” is not exactly the same as that of Huntington.

Rather, we rely on the work of Peter J. Katzenstein.¹² One of the foremost interpreters of Huntington, Katzenstein reconstructs Huntington’s approach in a more valid form, based on numerous criticisms¹³ and the rich literature of civilizational analysis.¹⁴

Figure 1.1. Civilizations in post-communist Eurasia. Source: based on Huntington (1996).

Legend: right-to-left diagonal: Western Christianity; horizontal: Eastern Orthodoxy; dotted: Islamic; vertical: Sinic; left-to-right diagonal: Buddhist; grey: outside the post-communist region we consider.

8 Acemoğlu, Johnson, and Robinson, “The Rise of Europe”; Raico, “The Theory of Economic Development and the European Miracle”; De Soto, The Mystery of Capital.

9 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.

10 Henderson, Industrial Revolution on the Continent.

11 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations.

12 Katzenstein, “A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations.”

13 For an overview, see Orsi, The ‘Clash of Civilizations’ 25 Years On.

14 For a meta-analysis, see Arnason, “Civilizational Analysis, History Of.”

36 • 1. Stubborn Structures

According to Katzenstein, there is large consensus in Huntington’s claim that civilizations are “plural,” meaning there are multiple civilizations in the world, but civilizations are also

“pluralist,” meaning they are not as homogeneous and unidirectional as Huntington would have us believe. As Katzenstein writes, civilizations are “not static and consensual but dy-namic and politically contested. If we think of them in terms of multiple modernities (as in Eisenstadt), or zones of prestige that embody intellectual disagreements (as in Collins), or multiple processes (as in Elias), [we can see that] each civilizational constellation is marked by political battles and contested truths.”¹⁵ However, Katzenstein argues that countries of a civilization are still brought together “under the emblem of ‘unity in diversity’” by two factors: (1) the particular types of interactions of the elites, underlining the role of civiliza-tional actors (states, polities, and empires) and techniques of silent spread, social emulation (copying), self-affirmation, and explicit export;¹⁶ and (2) the created civilizational identity of the people, which is “a taken-for-granted sense of reality that helps in distinguishing between self and other and right and wrong.”¹⁷ In the end, civilizations exist and, “under specific conditions […] political coalitions and intellectual currents can create primordial civilizational categories that are believed to be unitary and may even be believed to have the capacity to act.”¹⁸

Accepting Katzenstein’s reconstruction, the authors contributing to his edited vol-ume analyzed virtually the same civilizations as Huntington, while pointing out—for ex-ample—the ability of Europe to redefine itself, China being an obligatory role model for neighboring countries wanting to make relations with it (constituting the Sinic civiliza-tion), or Islam being a “bridge civilization” in Afro-Eurasia.¹⁹ Accordingly, we also accept Katzenstein’s approach as an update to Huntington while preserving Huntington’s notion of civilizational boundaries, keeping in mind the importance of intra-civilizational processes and the path-creating ability of countries embedded in civilizations [à 7.4.4]. However, we also insist on referring to some civilizations by religion, just as Huntington spoke about Western Christianity, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam. This is not because we hold that religion determines the development of the countries in question, although many scholars have underlined the importance of religion in development, conflict, and other aspects of politics.²⁰ Rather, our reason is that general religious patterns signify how the separation of the spheres of social action had taken place historically, which is not unrelated to the fact that churches helped sustain the merger of social spheres by taking part in political and communal action to different degrees in different civilizations. Huntington sums up the role of the church in Western and Eastern civilizations as follows: “Throughout West-ern history first the Church and then many churches existed apart from the state. God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing

15 Katzenstein, “A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations,” 29.

16 Katzenstein, “A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations,” 24–35.

17 Katzenstein, “A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations,” 12.

18 Katzenstein, “A World of Plural and Pluralist Civilizations,” 7.

19 Katzenstein, Civilizations in World Politics.

20 For a meta-analysis, see Deneulin and Rakodi, “Revisiting Religion.” With respect to Huntington, see Baumgartner, Francia, and Morris, “A Clash of Civilizations?”; Johns and Davies, “Democratic Peace or Clash of Civilizations?”

1.3. Thesis B: The Separation of Spheres Followed Civilizational Boundaries • 37 dualism in Western culture. […] In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is

God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior partner. The separation and recurring clashes between church and state that typify Western civilization have existed in no other civili-zation.”²¹ To be more precise, John Madeley provides a structured comparison of Western Christianity (composed of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism) and Eastern Orthodoxy, underlining the differences in the overarching role of the two churches in the political and communal spheres (Table 1.1).²²

Table 1.1. Comparing the paradigms of Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy. Source: modified from Madeley (2003, 40).

Western Christianity Eastern Orthodoxy

Own church law totally oriented around Pope as absolute

ruler, lawgiver and judge Church law incorporated into imperial state law under the authority of the imperial authorities

Church presented itself as a completely independent ruling

institution Church incorporated into imperial system in which secular

power dominated spiritual Approved wars to achieve spiritual ends (wars of conversion,

wars against pagans and heretics, crusades etc.) Entangled in most of the political and military conflicts of the secular power, the church often gave theological legitimi-zation to wars, even inspired them

Dominant social status, but with a celibate clergy, set apart from the people by celibacy

Clergy, apart from bishops, remained married and therefore closer to the people and more assimilated into the structure of society

China, with the presence of Buddhism in its territory, constitutes the individual core of the Sinic civilization, representing in pre-communist times Confucianism that entailed strong centralized authority and extended imperial control over “societal practices […] from lan-guage and religion to political institutions and economic activity.”²³ However, China is alone in the post-communist region we consider. The other countries, namely the ones that later belonged to the Soviet empire—including member states and Western satel-lite states—may be sorted into three historical regions by their civilizational belonging.

During the Cold War era, Hungarian historian Jenő Szűcs spoke of three historically de-fined regions of Europe, arguing that long before the Second World War, a Central-Eastern European region existed but was a part of what was then the Soviet Bloc.²⁴ He discerned the eastern perimeter of Central-Eastern Europe as the border between Western and Orthodox Christianity. As he writes, the “distinctly marked border splitting Europe [runs] along the southern reaches of the Elbe-Saale, the Leitha, and further along the western border of an-cient Pannonia,” which was “the eastern border of the Carolingian Empire around 800 AD”

where an “organic symbiosis of late Antique Christianity and barbarian Germanic elements

21 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 70.

22 Madeley, “A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of Church–State Relations in Europe.”

23 Kang, “Civilization and State Formation in the Shadow of China.”

24 Szűcs, “The Three Historical Regions of Europe.”

38 • 1. Stubborn Structures

had taken place over the previous three centuries.”²⁵ In line with Szűcs, Huntington speaks about “the great historical line that has existed for centuries separating Western Christian peoples from Muslim and Orthodox peoples,” a line that “dates back to the division of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century.” He succinctly adds: “Where does Europe end? Europe ends where Western Christianity ends and Islam and Orthodoxy begin.”²⁶

The territory of the post-Second World War Soviet Union only deviated from Szűcsian borders in two places: (1) it re-annexed the Catholic and Protestant Baltic states Russia had once conquered under the Tzars, and (2) in the Balkan states that were largely or wholly within the dominion of Orthodox Christianity (Bulgaria, Romania and parts of Yugoslavia) did not belong to the Soviet Union. Within the Soviet empire, there was a border dividing Central-Eastern Europe from Eastern Europe, or the historical region of Western Christi-anity from the Eastern Orthodox region. These are practically the same regions that Szűcs understands as the second and third historical regions of Europe. However, within the Soviet empire we also find Soviet Central Asia, representing a distinct region of societies of Islamic origins.²⁷ The lines of the three historical regions, defined by their civilizational belonging are clearly drawn in Figure 1.1.

In an illuminating passage, Russia expert Zoltán Sz. Bíró writes that “in the West, in the context of Latin Christianity, the omnipotence of the state was limited by [the au-tonomy of] the church, whereas in the East, in the context of Orthodoxy, this limiting role was unfulfilled.”²⁸ Indeed, what we can see is an institutional separation of secular and religious power in the Western Christian region, embedded into the larger project of “[reconstructing] European identity around secular ideas and reason […]. Growing autonomy of the political, cultural, and societal centers; acceptance of innovation and an orientation toward the future; shifts in the conception of human agency and autonomy;

and intense reflexivity [gave] rise to […] universalistic practices, including private religion, parliamentary democracy, universal citizenship and suffrage, science, market economy and trade, and human rights.”²⁹ This is in contrast with the symbiosis of the church and the state in the Eastern Orthodox historical region, just as with the more extreme lack of separation of social spheres enhanced by the identity of secular and spiritual rulership (theocracy) in the Islamic historical region. Indeed, in Central Asia state institutions following Islamic law could operate unhampered until 1917 and, “despite years of reprisal and persecution in the Soviet Union, Islam […] managed to preserve its spirit as a way of life that culturally defined every facet of the believer’s existence.”³⁰

To sum up, civilizational belonging corresponds to the pattern in which the sep-aration of spheres developed. What might appear as identity on the level of individuals appears as civilization on the level of the collective. Indeed, civilization is related to a whole host of phenomena, which are assembled in a structure with cohesion. Changing the

ele-25 Szűcs, “The Three Historical Regions of Europe,” 132.

26 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 158.

27 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 174–83.

28 Sz. Bíró, Az elmaradt alkotmányozás [The cancelled constitution making], 201.

29 Adler, “Europe as a Civilizational Community of Practice,” 71.

30 Tazmini, “The Islamic Revival in Central Asia,” 65.

1.3. Thesis B: The Separation of Spheres Followed Civilizational Boundaries • 39 ments one-by-one may not be feasible, especially by external intervention, as the structure

has a power of resistance—indeed, stubbornness—as a whole. We will see this notion come up later in the argument, but first we have to take into account the forms in which the ru-dimentary or lack of separation of spheres manifested.

1.3.2. The Basic Structure of Unseparated Spheres in a Feudal