The Transformation of the World (21 page)

As for “Far East,” which is still in occasional use, it stems like “Near East” and “Middle East” from the vocabulary of imperialism—and thus from the metageographical division of the world according to geopolitical-strategic criteria, which was so popular with geographers and politicians in the fin de siècle. Many statesmen—for example, the viceroy of India and later foreign secretary Lord Curzon—fancied themselves at the time as amateur geographers and indulged in speculations about the rise and fall of various world regions. When the term “Far East” was coined toward the end of the nineteenth century, it had a dual meaning. On the one hand, it took clichés about the Muslim “Orient” and extended them farther east, so that China, Japan, and Korea now appeared as those parts of a generalized “Orient” where the “yellow races” lived. But on the other hand, far more importantly, it operated as a geopolitical-strategic concept. This could appear only after the traditional Sinocentric world order had disappeared. Under European eyes, then, the “Far East” was a subsystem of world politics in which European influence was significant but did not, as in India or Africa, have the solid underpinning of colonial rule. The cultural specificities of the countries in question played only a secondary role; the main point of the concept was to define operational areas for the Great Powers. The geostrategic center of gravity of this Far East lay in the Yellow Sea and increasingly in Manchuria—regions that were more and more considered to be “pivots” (in Mackinder's sense) of Great Power rivalry. The crucial issue was the future of China as an imperial state. Unlike the analogous “Eastern Question” (which referred to the fate of another multinational entity, the Ottoman Empire) however, the “question of the Far East” also concerned the rise of a second, independent military power in the region: Japan.

Although, in terms of power politics, Japan was a major player alongside Britain and Russia in the Far Eastern arena, its relationship to other parts of the “East Asian” region was ambivalent. Korea, historically China's main tributary state, had had few, mostly unhappy, experiences with Japan, but in the Meiji period it came to be seen as a potential addition to the Japanese sphere of influence, and when a favorable opportunity arose in 1910 it was formally annexed. Since the last third of the nineteenth century, and especially since 1890, Japan had been mentally distancing itself from the Asian mainland. As Fukuzawa Yukichi put it in 1885, in his essay “Farewell to Asia” (
Datsu-a
), Japan was geographically but no longer culturally part of Asia, oriented politically and materially to the successful “West” and ever more inclined to belittle its former Chinese model.
²⁵
In contrast to this, however, there was a tendency toward the end of the century to proclaim Japan as the head of a “pan-Asiatic” resistance to the might of the West. This basic contradiction was also present in Japanese attitudes to “East Asia” (
Tōa
): a wish to be a peaceful part of it, but also an urge to dominate and “civilize” the other countries.
²⁶

Metageographic Alternatives

In the age of Ritter and Humboldt, geographers worked with finer regional grids than in the period
after
the consolidation of a map taking in all “the regions of the world.” By the first decade of the nineteenth century, they had left behind the schematism of “compendium geography” and “statistics” prevalent in eighteenth-century Germany in particular and were looking for new spatial entities to take as the basis for study. Carl Ritter was decisive in this regard. Rejecting the fixation on political states, he challenged the existing taxonomies and condemned the unmethodical collection of data in the old manuals.
²⁷
His new, physical classification of the earth's surface featured “countries” and “landscapes” instead of static kingdoms. But this did not prevent him from investigating the material lives and actions of human societies, understood as the theaters of history. In his view, the task of geography was to follow the development of nations—hence of the “individualities” that were important to him—in connection with the “nature of the land.” On the other hand, he avoided reducing the life of societies and the “movement of history” to natural constants such as climate. He was no geodeterminist. Ritter saw nature as the “school of the human race,” the source of collective identities and particular social types;
²⁸
there were correspondences rather than causal relations between nature and history. He took the descriptive vocabulary that geography had developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
²⁹
and complemented it with “dynamic” metaphors of growth and activity. Starting from his concept of an integrated “regional geography,” Ritter attempted to relate natural features such as mountain ranges or “water systems” to the theaters of history. Again and again he wrestled with the problem of “classifying the parts of the world”
³⁰
with a seriousness that placed him above earlier and many later geographers. In this way he arrived, for example, at a concept of “Upper Asia” (
Hoch-Asien
) that was not shallowly geopolitical but included the specificities of the natural relief as well as the lifestyles of its inhabitants.
³¹
Instead of lumping everything into “the Orient” or “the Near and Middle East,” he differentiated among West Asia (including the Iranian world), Arabia, and the “escarpment land” of the Euphrates and Tigris systems.

Ritter's original names did not become established. But his terminological ingenuity continued in the work of two important geographers of the last third of the century, who, though otherwise having little in common, each resisted the metageographical tendency of the age toward oversimplification. Both the French anarchist freethinker Elisée Reclus, who worked in exile in Switzerland and later Belgium, and the politically conservative but methodically path-breaking Leipzig geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel strove incessantly to use language in new ways to describe the world. Ratzel's
Anthropogeographie
(1882–91) and
Politische Geographie
(1897) spurned the newly fashionable megacategories in favor of a sophisticated study of landscape types and spatial “locations” in relation to political formations—for example, in the
discussion of islands.
³²
Reclus, in his last (partly posthumous) work, looked at the world situation shortly after the turn of the century through geographer's eyes, experimenting with an unusual macro-classification that used neither conventional divisions of the world nor geopolitical neologisms. Comparable only to Ritter in his knowledge of the geographical and political literature, he steered clear of a closed concept of Europe and divided the continent into three transgressive zones, each politically and economically related in distinctive ways to the extra-European world: (1) the Latin and German nations, including the whole Mediterranean basin as well as the Ottoman Empire, which in his view was “completely dependent on capitalists”;
³³
(2) land-based Eurasia from Poland to the Yellow Sea; and (3) maritime Britain and its associates and dependencies (
cortège
) including the whole empire headed by India.
³⁴
Finally, the two Americas and the Pacific Basin (except for the British possessions) constituted an entity that was newly taking shape. Reclus was a relational thinker, not someone who thought in essentialized regional categories. For that reason his work—more than that of Ratzel, who was rather inclined to schematic theorizing—may be seen today as a geographical summa of the nineteenth century, even if it is not representative of nineteenth-century academic geography.

Ratzel and, a fortiori, Reclus were far removed from the theories of “cultural arenas” (
Kulturkreise
) fashionable around the turn of the century in Germany and Austria. Reclus's left-wing political temperament made him especially averse to any geopolitical definition of regional zones. The
Kulturkreis
theories used the steady flow of ethnographic material to construct a series of extensive cultural arenas or civilizations, not merely as methodological aids but as entities to which they ascribed an objective existence. “Cultural arena” thus became the key postliberal concept, supplanting the “individual” in the idealist geography and history of Carl Ritter's generation.
³⁵
Those ideas, later to resurface in the work of Samuel P. Huntington, were a typical fin de siècle phenomenon, expressing an oversimplistic view of the world such as was also to be found in the terminology used by followers of geopolitics.

3 Mental Maps: The Relativity of Spatial Perspective

In order to reconstruct nineteenth-century conceptions of space, we need to keep questioning things that we today consider self-evident. The category of “the West” or “the Western world,” for instance—the “community of values” influenced by Christianity that has been counterposed first to the Muslim “Orient,” then to Soviet-style atheistic communism, and now again to “Islam”—does not appear as a dominant figure of thought before the 1890s.
³⁶
The opposition between Orient and Occident, the lands of the rising sun and the setting sun, goes back to ancient cosmology and the Greek-Persian wars. But “the Western world” first arose out of the idea of an overarching
Atlantic
model of civilization. To speak of the West presupposes that Europeans and North Americans
rank equally in global culture and politics. Such symmetry was not assured in European eyes until the turn of the twentieth century. The coupling of “Judeo-Christian civilization,” now a widely used synonym for “the West,” is an even more recent development, which had little public resonance before the 1950s.
³⁷

From the beginning, the idea of “the West” was even less bound to a particular territory than that of “the East.” Should it extend to the neo-European settler colonies of the British Empire: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand? How could it fail to include Latin America, especially those countries with a high percentage of people of European origin? Shouldn't we follow the Italian historian Marcello Carmagnani in speaking of “the other West”?
³⁸
In the long nineteenth century it was much more common to speak of “the civilized world” than of “the West”; it was a highly flexible, almost placeless designation. Its persuasiveness depended on whether those who described themselves as “civilized” could explain to others that that was what they really were. Conversely, after the middle of the century, elites all around the world made great efforts to satisfy the demands of civilized Europe. In Japan it even became the goal of national policy to be accepted as a civilized country. Westernization therefore meant not only to adopt certain elements of European and North American culture but, in the most ambitious cases, to gain recognition as an integral part of the “civilized world.” This was not something that could be given tangible form or represented spatially on world maps. The “civilized world” and its approximate synonym, “the West,” were not so much spatial categories as benchmarks within an international hierarchy.
³⁹

Europe

Even the category “Europe” was less clear at the edges than one nowadays likes to suppose. Elisée Reclus never tired of reminding his readers of that. To be sure, Europe was seen as being
in some way
a single historical entity and (internally differentiated) living space. A general “European consciousness,” over and above the religious self-definition of Christendom, emerged here and there among the elites in the course of the Enlightenment, and for Europe as a whole by the Napoleonic period at the latest.
⁴⁰
In the
first
half of the nineteenth century, however, a number of contradictory Europes appeared on the drawing board, each one linked to a particular vision of space:
⁴¹

▪
 the Europe of Napoleonic imperialism, conceived and organized around a core area from Tours to Munich, and Amsterdam to Milan, everywhere else being an “intermediate zone” or part of the outer ring of the empire
⁴²

▪
 the Europa Christiana of postrevolutionary Romanticism, including, as a special variant of limited practical relevance; Tsar Alexander I's Holy Alliance of 1815, in which Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism came together in the high-flying rhetoric of a religious renewal under Slav leadership

▪
 the power system of the Congress of Vienna, designed to create stable, peace-preserving balances without an all-embracing ideology referring to common European norms and values
⁴³

▪
 the Europe of western European liberals (with the historian and statesman François Guizot as its most influential proponent), which, in contrast to the Holy Alliance, sharply differentiated western and eastern Europe and regarded western European solidarity, and especially the Franco-British axis, as more important than any Eurasian commonality

▪
 the Europe of the democrats, who discovered the people as the subject of history (with great literary effect in Jules Michelet's
Le peuple
[1846] and his
Histoire de la Révolution française
[1847–53]) and who emphasized the national idea and a federation of European nations and liked to hark back to the Greek ideal of freedom
⁴⁴

▪
 the revolutionary counter-Europe of Marx and Engels's
Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei
(1848), evoking an international workers' solidarity that was at first also European in its core

The British had their own conceptions of Europe. A minority of the political elite—such men as Richard Cobden, the indefatigable advocate of free trade, or John Stuart Mill, the liberal philosopher and economist—were internationalist and in some cases outspokenly Francophile; while a majority did not think of the British Isles as part of the European continent, rejected it as a model, and favored remaining outside a continental balance of power. When racial doctrines began to proliferate in Europe in the 1880s, a British equivalent glorified the global dominance and civilizing diffusion of “the Anglo-Saxon race,” by no means limiting itself to the European continent.
⁴⁵