Sunday, April 03, 2011

War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin

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Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War contains some fascinating details about a period in European history that isn't often covered in order to justify a relatively comprehensive theory about what drives the rise and fall of empires. Since I only have Turchin's view of the events, I don't feel confident in judging the theory, but it does hang together fairly well. Turchin's argument is that societies in which diverse cultures mix and which have frequent contact and conflict with very different groups, usually develop strong asabiya (social capital, Fukuyama's Trust), which leads to a strong culture and government, and historically led to empire (which he defines as a large multiethnic territorial state with a complex power structure.) The mixing which he says is crucial happens most often at the boundaries between empires, so as an empire grows the boundaries grow more distant, and the asabiya is undercut, followed by collapse and the rise of a new empire at the edges of the old.

The heart of the book is a presentation on European history before and after the Roman Empire, focusing on the interactions between the central areas and their Germanic, Frankish, Russian, and Arabian neighbors. There is a lot of detail about the various tribes and societies, and how they interacted, fought, and traded superiority over time. This was quite interesting, but since it was mostly new to me, and presented in support of Turchin's thesis, it was hard to tell how much selective bias there might have been. Turchin covers interactions between Russians and both Tatars and Mongols. The Russians apparently don't have any natural barriers to the east or south, allowing invaders to attack repeatedly. According to the thesis, northern Italy, which had more interaction with divergent neighbors than southern Italy, developed stronger social cohesiveness, which is completely consistent with the argument in Trust.

Turchin is less convincing when he talks about what drives the disintegration of social cohesion. This may be because he relies less on historical evidence and more on colloquial argument. He puts most of the weight of his argument on the "Matthew Principal" ('The Rich get Richer and the Poor get Poorer'.) He argues it's a cyclic process that occurs between and within classes. This sounds like social mobility to me, but he seems to believe that it's more accordian-like, compacting and stretching out the classes, and he argues that social capital eventually dissipates because of the disparities. In his view, the rich have advantages that allow them to amass more and more, so inequality rises, which leads to a decay of asabiya, ending in the fall of another empire. But it's clear from his description that some of the upper classes are rising and others are falling, and the same thing happens to the middle and lower classes at the same time. He even gives examples of some of the wealthy spending their money foolishly and ending up poor, and of the middle and lower classes saving their money and making it into higher strata.

In the final chapter, Turchin acknowledges that the Internet and the spread of the cell phone have changed the dynamics. He suggests a couple of possible directions that things might go, and some ways in which his theory might continue to be useful, but admits that societies don't have much of the stratification or immobiilty that drove the dynamics in prior eras.

1 comment:

Mike Linksvayer said...

Turchin's argument is that societies in which diverse cultures mix and which have frequent contact and conflict with very different groups, usually develop strong asabiya

I read his argument as concerning only conflict, preferably involving existential challenge, between very different groups. I don't see frequent contact and mixing as part of his argument apart from the contact and mixing implied by war and raiding.

In his view, the rich have advantages that allow them to amass more and more, so inequality rises, which leads to a decay of asabiya, ending in the fall of another empire.

I see his argument hinging on another step between inequality and decay of asabiya -- conflict among elites.