The Geographic Morphology of Civilisations
On cores, peripheries and satellite civilisations
In addition to the chronological, temporal structure, each civilisation has its geographical, spatial structure, which reflects the nature of the landscape.
In his magnum opus, Arnold Toynbee writes of a primary axis that was the birthplace and vitality of Western civilisation, stretching from Rome, the Eternal City, through fertile and pleasant Tuscany and northern Italy, through the Alpine passes and Lorraine to the Flemish fields, and thence across the sea to remote Roman Britain on the far frontier of the Roman Empire at Hadrian's Wall. This axis has retained its momentum along the course of history, and though the vital source of innovation has shifted up and down over the course of the centuries. These were the places of the encounter between the Romance and Germanic dialects, the vitality of the Germanic raiders with the culture of the Gallo-Roman provincials. Out of this creative dynamic arose our civilisation; it was the industrial heart of the Old Continent that was called the 'blue banana' and it is here that the story of its integration began to be written after the tragedy and cataclysm of the two world wars.
Perpendicular to it, Toynbee perceives a secondary axis, a geopolitical axis , which points east and northeast to Brandenburg, Poland and the Baltic; southeast beyond the Pyrenees and the Atlantic to Spain and Latin America. This is the axis along which kings have led their campaigns and along which military glory and force of arms have moved in the rhythm of the centuries.
A line of dynamics and contact, of encounter and mixing, that is not just our speciality, a European one. Such was also found in Asia, on the borderland between the Iranian plateau and the plains of Central Asia, where the ancient Persians met the Turkic tribes - along a belt from Anatolia, through Azerbaijan, to Khorasan - here, on the edge of settled and nomadic subsistence, the Iranian, Turco-Persian civilisation took shape.
To understand the internal structure of our civilisation, let us pay attention to Kelley Ross's concept of distinguishing the core and periphery of civilisations. Consider only ours, where the core areas are the birthplaces of civilisation - here the places within the borders of the Frankish Empire, washed by the English Channel and the Elbe, to the crests of the Pyrenees and the borders of the Italian Mezzogiorno. Here were laid the foundations on which the edifice of our civilisation stands, and its creative spirit has not ceased to spread outwards, in all directions, to the peripheries which encircle it like an outer ring. They are in constant living contact, receiving the living current and retaining their own genius loci[1] , their own inimitable features, by which they bring their own shades to this civilisation.
And just as the creative spirit of civilisation has spread from the core to the periphery, so too have its bearers, coming from the densely populated core areas: German Ostsiedlung to the lands of the Mezzogiorno and the Baltic enclaves of Lombard colonists in the Mezzogiorno, in Calabria and Sicily, the spread of the Catalan language south of the Ebro, to Valencia, as well as across the sea, to the Balearic Islands and to Sardinian Alghero, to the numerous Norman nobility settled in the British Isles, to the
In the peripheries, the ethos of the frontiersman, this desire to spread the patrimony of his civilisation beyond the horizon, this age-old adventurous setting of man, became established. La Hispanidad was born in the centuries-old crusading tradition of the Reconquista of the northern kingdoms of Galicia, Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia southwards, spreading their own dialects, replacing the Mozarabic varieties although Spanish rivers flowed from east to west. We find echoes of it in the spirit of the Conquista of the New World and the Indian Ocean, and in the Portuguese Inquisition in the most brilliant of its Indian dominions, the haven of Goa. Its ethos is best summed up in El Cid Campeador, the prototype of the Spanish-American heroes[2]. We find a similar ethos in the Northern Crusades, against the Baltic, Baltic and Finnish tribes on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic Sea, the conquests of the Swedes, Danes, Livonian Order and Teutonic Order in Prussia, Curonia, Livonia, Estonia and Finland. Neighbouring Poland itself was long considered Antemurale Christianitatis, literally a bastion of Christianity, as was Croatia. Vast areas of Croatia, even after the Ottomans had been driven out south of the Sava and Danube, were set aside as the Military Frontier, croaticé Vojna Krajina[3]
Still further away from the core we find satellite civilisations that are so distant from the core that the radiance of its light does not reach there, perhaps only a dim glimmer, and so they are called upon to begin to shine with their own, modest light. The obstacle is often twofold - first, the dykes and boundaries put in the way by nature's own - the majestic and unconquered peaks of the Himalayas or the impenetrable jungles - and second, the tribes who have preserved an indigenous way of life that historians have not hesitated to label as barbaric - the unconquered hill people of Arunachal Pradesh, the desert Chichimeca of northern Mexico, or the Thaic Zhuang tribes - who separated central civilisation from its satellites, allowing them to come up with their own original responses to the challenges that nature and their neighbours, time and their own dynamics had in store for them.
And so often we come to cases where our understanding of one civilisation continues to obscure our understanding of the depth of the other's society, so often indeed we come to see that the latter is a civilisation distinct from the former.
And so take a scholar of the history of medieval China, familiar with its political forms and the succession of dynasties. And so, in effect, they will say that this or that emperor belonged to the Tang or Song dynasty. He will be no stranger to the idea of the Mandate of Heaven and the succession of dynasties, and he will also understand the plurality of its spiritual and philosophical forms, from folk religion through Chinese Buddhism to Confucianism and Taoism. He will understand how the Confucian worldview shaped bureaucratic traditions and Chinese reverence for education, and will also understand the influence of mystical Taoism and its quest for immortality
Our scholar of Chinese history will now turn his mind's attention to the medieval period of the Land of the Rising Sun, where he encounters entirely new phenomena, inexplicable through the morphology of Chinese civilisation. There is no dynastic cycle here, and the Japanese emperors proudly claim an unbroken imperial lineage emerging from times immemorial, though its power was often limited and its real power rested in the hands of the shogun, to whom we find no equivalent in Chinese history. In the same way, we find that Japanese history is not divided according to the rhythm of the rise and fall of the various dynasties, but is divided according to the periods corresponding to the various seat cities.
In looking at the feudal structure of Japan, a knowledge of medieval Europe serves us better than that of China. Observing medieval dukes and landlords, one finds the equivalent of powerful daimyo, and looking at intrepid samurai, one sees relatives of our knights. And this Japanese feudalism may astonish him when he sees clearly the real isolation of Japan, which from the earliest settlement has scarcely ever had to defend its own distinctiveness against foreign onslaught, while China has been struggling with the pressure of unruly steppe raiders, whom it wished to overwhelm by the building of the Great Wall of China.
And yet, Japanese culture, from art to architecture to writing and language, bears undeniable Chinese traces. Its heraldic traditions reveal a synthesis of both indigenous and continental traditions : the indigenous mon system persists here alongside the East Asian tradition of seals. Likewise, the script combines Chinese characters with indigenous Japanese script.
Staying in Asia , let us climb to the roof of the world in Tibet. Perhaps in the meantime we have come to understand the colourful mosaic of Indian civilisation, its myriad deities and castes, and a great multitude of other phenomena that are hardly to be found here, even though Tibetan script belongs to the Indian family of scripts and Vajrayana Buddhism, as a religion of Indian origin, shapes the worldview here.
Similarly, the Ethiopian Highlands, the cradle of coffee, share some common features with the Middle East, though in many ways it differs from it. All three are clear examples that history is not only a story of coming together and coming together, but also carries a history of parting and finding one's own historical destiny. And so, indeed, Japan and China were closer in earlier times than in later times, when they went in different directions on their historical pilgrimage.
And so we can name Japan, Tibet or Ethiopia as satellite civilisations that have been formed in a creative tension between the taken and the foreign, between reception and tradition, growing up in the shadow of larger cultural units, they have managed to develop their own identity, their own genius loci, and to understand them we need a knowledge of both - of the local specialties and of the civilisation around which they orbit. And indeed, the name satellite civilisation well describes their position -they are like moons orbiting a planet, like Ganymede around Jupiter, distinct and yet connected, retaining their own halo and place in the great cosmic symphony of history.
Grasping the idea of satellite civilisations will unravel many puzzles about the distinctiveness or lack thereof of this or that civilisation, be it Ethiopia, Tibet or Latin America[4].
The latter is indeed the satellite civilisation par excellence. We can find cultural ties that strongly link it to Europe, but we can also find the distinct features that led Huntington and Lynch to see it as a separate civilisation, just as Jeff Jones's Country Similarity Index[5] shows.
The links of language and religion are obvious - the Spanish language links a wide swath of the American continent from Tijuana, California, to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of the continent. Combine this with Portuguese, born on the same peninsula as Castilian, knowledge of these two Romance languages opens up the horizons of almost the entire American continent south of the Rio Grande. Along with the language, the Catholic faith unites La Hispanidad on both sides of the Atlantic, although in the Mexican or Peruvian countryside it merges with indigenous traditions in a syncretic synthesis.
In other respects, however, these civilisations are markedly different: although the countries of the Southern Cone (hispanicé: Cono Sur), made up of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, as well as the southern provinces of Brazil, have a European physiognomy, in Guatemala, Peru or Bolivia, a Native American physiognomy prevails, while in many other countries mestizos, who have been created by the blood-mixing of inhabitants of Hispanic and indigenous descent, predominate in numbers. Its political and social development has followed different vectors from those of Europe. The independent republics came under the rule of local caudillos, who were succeeded by an evolution from nobility, to nationalists, to military dictators, to liberals, and finally a turn to the left since 2005.
[1] For example, the Spanish traditionalist movement of Carlism explicitly opposes the infiltration of influences from the core of Frankish civilisation (afrancesamiento,), with an emphasis on preserving its own particularist identity, La Hispanidad (ELÍAS DE TEJADA, Francisco, GAMBRA CIUDAD Rafael and PUY MEÑOZ Francisco : ¿Que es el Carlismo?, p. 28.)
[2] ELLIS, Erik Z. D. : The Poetics of History: El Cid and the Quest for La Hispanidad in The European Conservative, autumn 2023
[3] The term Krajina is used in South Slavic languages to refer to the borderlands. The separatist entity of the Serbs during the Yugoslav Wars (gerebatur 1991-1995) was called the Republika Srpska Krajina, with the capital city of Knin, and consisted mainly of the part of the former imperial military frontier adjacent to Croatia proper in the narrower sense, though excluding the Slavonian Military Frontier. On the contrary, parts of the North Dalmatian interior, including its capital Knin, belonged there as well. On the other side of the border was Bosanska Krajina, the borderlands of northwestern Bosnia, inhabited mostly by Serbs and, in the valley of the Una and partly Sana rivers (called Cazinska Krajina, after the town of Cazin), by Bosniak Muslims. The name of the state of the Ukraine has a similar etymology.
[4] The Philippines, although separated from the Mexican mainland by the entire width of the Pacific, is also part of the Latin American civilisation, having been part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the archipelago was on the borderline of Chinese and Indian influence. After the end of Spanish rule, the islands shared the fate of Puerto Rico and Cuba by coming under the rule of the Americans. Ties southward to the Malay world remained vibrant through the Muslim community in southern Mindanao, while the Chinese community retained its position mainly in the urban areas.