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Forum: Linklater's Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems
Western civilisation?
When asked by a reporter what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have replied that 'it would be a good idea'. Apocryphal or not, Gandhi's remark speaks to the 'dark side' of Western civilisation: its histories of imperialism and colonialism, authoritarianism and racism, genocide and mass warfare. In the contemporary world, these histories are under close scrutiny, both in the academy and the wider world. The former can be seen in the array of texts, from global history to postcolonial scholarship, which examines the interrelationship between the 'rise of the West' and the 'decline of the Rest'.1The latter can be seen in the malaise that infuses Western international order, whether this is found in its forums of governance, deepening levels of inequality, or in increasingly polarised debates over immigration, race, and sexuality. A transnational movement of anti-establishment groups, present in much of Europe and North America, is but one barometer of a general atmosphere of discontent that permeates Western international order.
It is a brave individual who marches into this landscape arguing that the contemporary Western states-system is a singularly civilised order, the inheritor of advances made over several centuries. Yet this is the path chosen by Andrew Linklater. His trilogy of interventions into the shape and trajectory of modern international order (two books published; one to come) is nothing if not 'untimely' in that it cuts against the grain of trends within contemporary world politics, while simultaneously speaking to an earlier tradition of scholarship, one associated with Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, as well as the two figures on which Linklater most heavily draws: Norbert Elias and Martin Wight. Much of this untimeliness is welcome - Linklater has written a big book (literally as well as figuratively), one that seeks to capture the principal contours of Western historical development from ancient Greece to the present day. It is that most unfashionable of contemporary academic texts: a grand narrative, so grand as to be bordering on the monumental in its scale and ambition. The scholarship that informs Violence and Civilization is deep and erudite, and its argument is arresting. It is a book that many will -...