Hello everyone!
November and December have been packed with crises, transitions, inflections…you name it. Beijing Baselines has to swim hard to get upstream of the G20, BRI, BRICS and APEC, Xi/Biden, Wang Yi/von der Leyen summits and attendant headlines.
Here we are nearing Christmas, still digesting the Central Financial Work and Economic conclaves. Looming behind these, the Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas and Beijing-Taiwan conflicts have not gone away.
Their vast and deadly implications lend special savour to the following op-ed by the great public intellectual, Sun Liping 孙立平, whom we have encountered on memorable previous occasions (see ‘The Era of Dismantling’ (3 June 2023, here) and ‘Russian security: scorn poured by Sun Liping’ (June 2022, here).
Director of Sociology at Tsinghua University, Professor Sun won celebrity as the notional supervisor of Chairman Xi Jinping’s (notional?) doctoral thesis; and respect as author of scores of op-eds, amid serious academic works. Widely circulated in late 2023 is a line from his 2021 op-ed ‘What's Wrong with our Experts?’ (translated in our fraternal website, David Ownby’s Reading the China Dream): ‘the wine at the end of the feast is gone’.
Sun Liping
How did Europe get out of fratricide?1
‘Once ferocious Vikings, we are now one of the most peaceful societies in the world’.
Said to be written on the homepage of an official Danish website, this statement is even more appropriate when applied to Europe. The outbreak of war in Ukraine aroused my interest in the history of that region. Leafing through history books, I can't help but be surprised at how many wars took place there in history. Back to present-day reality, it’s also surprising that Europe is the least war-torn place in the world today.
These are two simultaneously interesting and interrelated questions. Why is this happening? What's the answer?
Saying that Europe is the continent with the most frequent wars in history should arouse no objections. Both world wars broke out in Europe; the main battlefields were there as well. There were countless wars under various names in history. The Roman, Austro-Hungarian and British, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, or Tsarist Russia, which of these empires or maritime overlords or colonists could do without war? Which one could do without conquering cities?
It’s been calculated that there were only 15 years of peace within Europe, in the millennium before World War II. The impression is given that anyone could fight anyone. From the broad lines of clues, there were wars between the barbarians in the north and Rome in the south, between the island nation of England in the west and continental European states, and wars between Slavic peoples in the east and Germans in the centre. There were often constant wars within the same nation.
Why so many wars in European history? This, some argue, is because Europeans are more warlike than other people: i.e., white people are more warlike than other races. Evidence is of course readily available: outside of Europe, the US has launched more than 200 foreign wars over the 240 years since its founding, an average of just over once a year. Türkiye, the historical Ottoman Empire, almost conquered Europe. The Arabs too were extremely expansionist. White people established multiple empires throughout history, including the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Aryan Indian Empire.
Others argue that Europe’s frequent wars are related to its geographical features. In the east, it faced the world's tough and brave nomads; to the south were the Iranian and Arab empires, full of religious passion. Then there are many European peninsulas, cut by a series of mountain ranges in the central and southern parts. The geographical unit of Europe as a whole is small and fragmented. Nor has Europe a dominant river: it’s difficult for countries to connect forming an overwhelming local power via a river. A fragmented structure can easily fall into separatist disputes.
These explanations superficially make sense, yet fail to explain the following facts: whether for Europeans or Caucasians, they are European mountains, European waters, yet since World War II Europe had few wars until the Yugoslav Civil War broke out in the 1990s. And we know that this war had a special background. Of course, there were external wars in some European countries during this period, but despite this, Europe as a whole lived in peace in the past 80 years.
How did such a transformation occur? Reasons for it may be many, but I think the most important thing was the change in the entire social atmosphere and temperament. This change is concretely reflected in the process of the formation of modern civilisation. In differentiating between civilisation and barbarism, we sometimes mean this. But what we need to know is that ‘modern civilisation’ as referred to here does not mainly go to external manifestations, such as being gentle or knowledgeable. As Weber said, the core of modern civilisation is the process of rationalisation.
Weber's thought is well know to many of you. Rationalisation is one of his core theoretical concepts. Let’s leave aside scholarly debate about rationality. We can roughly grasp it as a logical connection between the means and ends of social action. If this notion still feels a bit vague, we can grasp it in terms of its opposite—irrationality.
It’s then not difficult for us to grasp the following distinction. Hoodlums on the street often get into fights and brawls. ‘What are you looking at me for? What's wrong with you?’ Just these two sentences may result in a bruising. This rarely happens among highly educated white-collar workers. What's the difference? It’s all about weighing the pros and cons. The former has a rush of blood to the head that nothing else matters, while the latter has to weigh whether it's worth it or not. This distinction matters.
Knowing how to weigh and know the pros and cons is the most superficial and important meaning of rationality. With this concept, people began to look for ways to resolve contradictions and conflicts with both advantages and disadvantages. Over time, a kind of custom and culture was formed. In such an atmosphere and culture, people no longer admire strength or force as they did in the past, and even regard it as crude. To grasp why wars have decreased, in other words, we must first grasp this change in people's minds.
Of course, such a conceptual change cannot occur in a vacuum. We need to pay attention to the changes taking place in social life as a whole at this time. This change is the process of industrialisation and the development of science and technology. Why were people, especially nomads, so interested in land and territory during the agricultural age? Because land means harvest and living space. To obtain land, war and conquest were necessary.
Things were different in the industrial age, however. Land and mines were still valuable, but competition for this also occurred from time to time. But its importance had undoubtedly been greatly reduced. Who can create and own more wealth in the industrial age mainly depends on capital, equipment, technology, knowledge, creativity, etc. And can these be obtained through war or the state? Obviously not.
In Harari's words, in times like these, the returns on war and conquest have declined. We might add that the costs of war are rising: it often causes not only destruction of things that create wealth, but indeed the destruction of wealth itself. In past wars, burning, killing, and looting might have burned straw and simple thatched houses, but in modern wars, what was destroyed might be high-rise buildings and bustling cities.
Only when they understand the pros and cons, understand trade-offs, and grasp that wealth does not mainly come from wars and conquests, can people sit down, calmly discuss and formulate rules and institutional arrangements to resolve conflict. As a result, there are negotiation mechanisms, coordination mechanisms, and various transnational, regional, and international organisations. Thus, in many cases, war became unnecessary.
Sun Liping, "How did Europe get out of fratricide?”, Sun Liping shehui guancha, 22 October 2023 [孙立平:“欧洲是如何走出相近相杀的?”,孙立平社会观察,2023年10月 22日 (in Chinese).]. —Translation (machine-assisted, reference-quality) © Daev Keli 2023.