When China Rules the World (7 page)

This brings us to the broader political, cultural and intellectual framework of Europe’s passage to modernity. The roots of European civilization are usually traced back to Greek democracy, Roman law and Judaeo-Christian religion. It has been commonplace to regard these as preconditions for, as well as characteristics of, European modernity. Although the impact of democracy in ancient Greece has been exaggerated, with the West not adopting it, except for small minorities, until the late nineteenth century at the earliest, there is no mistaking the broad influence that Greek civilization has exercised on European history down the ages, including the way we think about right and wrong, the tradition of debate and oratory, the notion of independent citizenship, and the idea of democracy. A more prosaic example is the constant recycling of mainly Doric but also Ionic and, via the Roman Empire, Corinthian columns as the preferred architectural style for buildings that seek to convey a sense of eternal authority, from the Bank of England to the Supreme Court.
³³
Similarly, the development of Roman-inspired law - essentially through Christianity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries - helped to establish the concept and reality of an independent legal system, which played a significant role in the subsequent entrenchment of property rights.
³⁴
Finally, Christianity was to imbue Europe with a powerful sense of universalism, which was to shape the continent’s attitudes towards not only itself but also other cultures and races, playing an important role in moulding the colonial mentality and the notion of a civilizing mission.
³⁵

It is not difficult, then, to see the lines of continuity, but it is rather more difficult to argue that they were necessary conditions for take-off. These cultural characteristics certainly helped to shape European modernity, but that is not the same as them being preconditions. Something similar can be said of Western individualism and the Western family. It would appear, with the benefit of hindsight, for example, that many different types of family are compatible with the process of industrialization. A significant area of European advantage was in the field of science, based on the growing autonomy of intellectual inquiry, spreading networks of scientific activity, and the routinization of research and its diffusion.
³⁶
But other intellectual traditions, notably the Chinese during the Qing dynasty and the Islamic, also gave rise to forms of debate, argument and empirical observation that stand comparison with the emerging scientific rationalism of Western Europe. The rider - and a very important one - is that in these other traditions there was still a strong tendency to seek to reconcile new arguments with those of older authorities, instead of rejecting them.
³⁷

By 1800 Europe had accumulated various cultural assets, such as the rule of law and the beginnings of parliamentary government, but these were not the key to its economic breakthrough. They should be seen as characteristics of European modernity rather than as preconditions for it.
³⁸
There is no reason to believe that other cultures - with their own diverse characteristics - were not capable of achieving the breakthrough into modernity: this, after all, is precisely what has been happening since 1960. Fundamental to an understanding of why Europe succeeded and China failed at the end of the eighteenth century are conjunctural factors rather than long-run cultural characteristics. Christopher Bayly draws the following conclusion: ‘If, in terms of economic growth, what distinguished Europe from China before 1800 was only its intensive use of coal and the existence of a vast American hinterland to Europe, then a lot of cultural baggage about inherent European political superiorities looks ready to be jettisoned.’
³⁹

Far from Europe being the template of modernity which every subsequent transformation should conform to and be measured by, the European experience must be regarded - notwithstanding the fact that it was the first - as highly specific and particular.
⁴⁰
In practice, however, it has seen itself, and often been seen as, the defining model. This is not surprising. The extraordinary global hegemony enjoyed by Europe for almost two centuries has made the particular seem universal. What, then, have been the peculiar characteristics of Europe’s passage to, and through, modernity?

Although European nations spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy fighting each other, the European passage to modernity from the mid sixteenth century onwards was achieved without, for the most part, a persistent threat from outside, with the exception of the Ottoman Empire in the south-east. By the seventeenth century, however, the latter was progressively being rolled back, though it was not until the nineteenth century that it was finally excluded from the Balkans.
⁴¹
Europe was the only continent to enjoy this privilege. Every subsequent aspirant for modernity - Asia, Africa, Latin America - had to confront and deal with an outside predator in the form of the modern European nations. Even the European settlers in North America had to fight the British in the American War of Independence to establish their sovereignty and thereby create the conditions for economic take-off. A consequence of this is that Europe has been little concerned in recent centuries with dealing with the Other, or seeking to understand the Other, except on very much its own, frequently colonial, terms. Only relatively recently did this begin to change.

Europe’s colonial history, in fact, is a further distinguishing characteristic. From the sixteenth century to the 1930s European nations, in a remarkable display of expansion and conquest, almost uniquely (the only other instance being Japan) built seaborne empires that stretched around the world. The colonies, especially those in the New World and, in the case of Britain, India and the Malay Peninsula,
⁴²
were to be the source of huge resources and riches for the imperial powers. Without them, as we have seen, Europe could not have achieved its economic take-off in the way that it did. No non-European country, bar Japan after 1868, was to achieve take-off in the nineteenth century: as a result, a majority found themselves colonized by the European powers.

Although the passage through modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to a service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all) - with Britain, Belgium and Germany (in that order) at the head - are the
only
ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was
larger
than either agrarian or service employment.
⁴³
In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in 1911, when it accounted for 52.2 per cent of the total labour force: by way of contrast, the peak figure for the United States was 35.8 per cent in 1967 and for Japan 37.1 per cent in 1973. It was the sheer weight of industrial society that was to lend modern Europe many of its most distinctive characteristics, notably the centrality of class conflict and importance of trade unions. From a global perspective, a different and far more common path has been to move directly, in terms of employment, from a largely agrarian to a mainly service society, without a predominantly industrial phase, a route that has been followed by the United States, Canada, Japan and South Korea.
⁴⁴

Although the pace of European industrialization was extremely rapid by the standards of previous economic change, it was slow compared with subsequent take-offs, the United States included, but especially East Asia.
⁴⁵
The transformation of Western Europe was a long and protracted affair: it took Britain, after all, over two centuries to get where it is now. One consequence has been that the conflict between modernity and tradition has been relatively muted. The European city neatly illustrates this point: it is like a geological formation, one era of architecture existing cheek by jowl with another, a living museum embracing centuries of history, in contrast to North America, where cities were newly created, and East Asia, where little survives from the past in places like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.

Another peculiar characteristic of Europe has been a succession of intra-continental conflicts or what might be described as internal wars.
⁴⁶
Perhaps this was in part due to the relative lack of an external threat, which meant that the dominant fault lines were national or intra-European rather than to do with the outside, as was to be the case, in varying degrees, with colonized societies. The initial cause of these internal wars was religious conflict, starting in 1054 with the struggle between eastern and western Christianity followed, after 1517, by the division between Catholicism and Protestantism, which was to split the continent largely on a north-south axis. The persistence of these religious conflicts was to lend Europe a strongly doctrinal way of thinking which was initially expressed in theological and then later ideological forms. This was to be a far more pronounced characteristic than in any other continent: most of the major non-religious ‘isms’ - for example, liberalism, anarchism, socialism, communism, republicanism, monarchism, Protestantism and fascism - were European in origin.
⁴⁷
From the 1540s to the 1690s Europe’s internal wars were largely concerned with the consolidation of the early modern states. After the French Revolution, class assumed growing importance, and from the early nineteenth century until the late twentieth century it formed the overarching language of European politics and society in a way that was never to be the case anywhere else in the world. From 1792 through to around 1870 the establishment of nation-states was to play a fundamental role in Europe’s internal wars. By the late nineteenth century these national rivalries were to be increasingly transposed on to the global stage, with the struggle over colonies, notably in Africa, contributing to the First World War. The Second World War started as a further instalment of Europe’s internal wars but rapidly spread to engulf most of the world, although its heartland remained in Europe. This penchant for internal war found global projection in the very European phenomenon of the Cold War, in which the fundamental divide was ideological, with the two great ‘isms’ of the time - capitalism and communism - ranged against each other. Ultimately, this appetite for internal war was to prove near-fatal for Europe: it fought itself to a standstill in the two world wars of the twentieth century and thereby rendered itself both exhausted and, in terms of global power, largely a spent force.
⁴⁸

Finally, the transformation of Europe has also been differentiated by individualism. The historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has described individualism as ‘the view that society is constituted of autonomous, equal units, namely separate individuals, and that such individuals are more important, ultimately, than any larger constituent group.’
⁴⁹
This is very different from East and South Asian cultures, where group rather than individual identity is central. Take the family, for example. The English family system had its origins in the thirteenth century and, courtesy of the Pilgrims, it also became the basis of the family system in North America. This individualistic system, with its emphasis on the nuclear family, stands in stark contrast to the traditional extended-household, arranged-marriage, kinship-based systems to be found in societies like China and India, whose values and distinctive characteristics persist to this day, notwithstanding urbanization and a dramatic fall in the size of the nuclear family.
⁵⁰
Thus, while marriage in the West is essentially a union of two individuals, in Chinese and Indian culture it involves the conjoining of two families.

Europe’s journey to and through modernity took highly specific and unique forms - the relative absence of an external threat, colonialism, the preponderance of industry, relatively slow growth, a pattern of intra-European conflict (or what I have termed ‘internal wars’), and individualism. We should not therefore be surprised that the characteristics of its modernity are also more distinctive than is often admitted. Since Europe has enjoyed such a huge influence on the rest of the world, however, distinguishing between the specific and the universal is often difficult and elusive. Europeans, unsurprisingly, have long believed that what they have achieved must be of universal application, by force if necessary. It is only with the rise of a range of new modernities that it is becoming possible to distinguish between what is universal and what is specific about the European experience.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, GDP per head in Western Europe and on the North American seaboard was perhaps twice that of South Asia and roughly on a par with Japan and the southern and eastern seaboard of China. By 1900, income per head in Western Europe and the North American seaboard dwarfed that of China by a margin of at least ten times. China was to pay dearly for its inability to overcome the economic constraints that began to bear down on it during the late eighteenth century; in contrast, Europe luxuriated in its good fortune. The key to Europe’s transformation was the Industrial Revolution. Britain’s was well under way before 1800; by the second half of the nineteenth century, it had been joined by much of Western Europe. Previously economic growth was of a glacial speed; now compound rates of growth ensured that Western Europe far outdistanced every other part of the world, the United States being the most important exception. Apart from North America, the old white settler colonies
⁵¹
and Japan after 1868, Europe enjoyed a more or less total monopoly of industrialization during the nineteenth century, a scenario with profound consequences for everyone else.

The economic chasm that opened up between Europe and nearly everywhere else greatly enhanced its ability to dominate the world.
⁵²
The colonial era had started in the seventeenth century, but from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, with the progressive acquisition of India, it rapidly expanded. In the name of Christianity, civilization and racial superiority, and possessed of armies and navies without peer, the European nations, led by Britain and France, subjugated large swathes of the world, culminating in the scramble for Africa in the decades immediately prior to 1914.
⁵³
Savage wars took place between whites and non-whites as Chinese, Indians and native peoples in North America, Australasia and southern Africa made their last stand against European assaults on their religions, rulers, land and resources.
⁵⁴
Niall Ferguson writes: