Politics and Culture in International History

From the Ancient Near East to the Opening of the Modern Age

Adda B. Bozeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351498517
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The current political conflicts in Somalia and Russia make the reappearance of this book as relevant as ever. Politics and Culture in International History illumines world politics by identifying the causes of conflict and war and assessing the validity of schemes for peace and unity. Bozeman maintains that political systems are grounded in cultures; thus, international relations are by definition hitercultural relations. She deals exclusively with the thought patterns of the world's literate civilizations and societies between the fourth millenium B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D.

In a substantial new introduction, Bozeman analyzes world politics over the last half century, showing how the interplay of politics and culture has intensified. She notes that the world's assembly of states is no longer held together by substantive accords on norms, purposes, and values, but by loose agreements on the use offorms, techniques, and words. The causes and effects of these changes between the 1950s and 1990s are assayed by Bozeman.

Part I
The Ancient Near East and India

Chapter 1
The Ancient Near East in International Relations

A. The Significance of Near Eastern History for the Concept of International History

The interdependence of all nations and cultures is generally taken for granted in the twentieth century world. It is usually seen in two perspectives of time. Contemporary generations have discovered, under the sudden impact of revolutionary forces set in motion by preceding generations, that the problems of the present and expectations of the future are essentially shared concerns throughout the world, however differently they may manifest themselves locally. A similar realization, however, has as yet not illumined their understanding of the past. In this perspective man’s mind continues to move, consciously or unconsciously, in strictly local circuits. But since his memory feeds his view of the present and his vision of the future, all contemporary efforts to solve existing problems and realize future hopes in an internationally meaningful and effective way will fall short of their aim as long as they are not inspired by the awareness that history, too, is shared international experience.

Many circumstances make it difficult to come to this awareness. “Time,” for instance, has not always or everywhere been clearly conceived in terms of past, present, and future. In the consciousness of nonliterate peoples in particular, these perspectives have often tended to merge in a wider but much less clearly defined experience of existence, and the local methods of recording this experience have not been easily intelligible to literate men whose very approach to time stimulated the invention of quite different methods of recording the events encompassed. Only after literacy had set the pattern for history as it is generally understood today did the more imaginative of literate men begin to reconstruct the chronologies of societies that to them seemed historically “lost.” Since their own view of history frequently barred them from understanding the meanings attributed to the past in these other cultures, however, they did not always preserve the authenticity of local experience in their accounts.

Methods employed in reconstructing the past have also retarded the development of international history. In public understanding at least, history has come to mean the sum total of available and readable local chronologies. These chronologies are usually seen as running on separate tracks through time and space. Junctions are not really expected. They can, of course, not be ignored when they are obviously marked by such actual encounters as geographical contiguity, war, trade, or diplomacy. But the countless historical situations in which separate chronologies interlock through the diffusion of ideas become visible only to those who are willing to leave the accustomed local tracks in order to look for new ways of reliving the past.

Even nonliterate peoples at times dimly perceived junctions of this kind when, for instance, bards in the West African Sudan reached out through folklore and myth to incorporate the experiences of other nations into the stream of their own memories. And scholars locate them today in increasing numbers as they apply their technical skills across the boundaries of epochs and areas to uncover the many connections, cross references, synchronisms, and correlations that mark history as a continuous international experience.

The general attitudes and particular skills that have made it possible to think of the past in these terms originated between 4000-1500 B.C. in the Near East, India, and China. But for thousands of years the experiences there registered held no meaning for peoples in other regions of the world. Writing and literacy had to be diffused from their early Near and Far Eastern centers before Europeans, for instance, could share not only in the history of Egypt and Mesopotamia, but also in the experiences of all other nations that had succeeded in the course of time to the ancient heritage.

The forms of thought and action that literacy made possible led in the realm of government and politics to the evolution of a special kind of community organization known ever since as the state. The type for this associational design was first established during the formative period of the Near and Far East. The immediate causes for the evolution of particular states varied then as they have varied ever since. They can be traced, in some cases, to the need for organizing worship, in others to the need for regulating economic activities or for securing adequate defence. Then as now, states enclosed greatly differing social orders. Life in some communities was regulated by elaborate written laws, in others by a tradition of general understanding, in still others by a government’s absolute power. Political jurisdiction might extend to city-states or cover a vast empire. Regardless of historical inception, size, power, or social content, however, the very existence of the state expressed in all cases agreement on the outer form of political organization.

As these agreements multiplied in the Near and Far East, the state became an internationally shared form. In this function it served both East and West (i.e., what was then considered West) as the chief agency of international communication and supplied a framework for the first regularized system of international relations. On this first rough draft of a society of nations that international history records, generations have been elaborating ever since.

For twentieth century men, hard pressed by revolutions that are world-wide in scope, the records of the ancient Near East hold a further meaning. They tell of the first great cultural revolution in the known annals of humanity. Inventions such as writing, concepts such as the continuity of history, and institutions such as the state were in their time radical departures from older patterns of life. The proper uses of literacy, history, and the state have remained the most challenging problems in contemporary international relations, and no definite answers to their challenge have as yet been found.

B. The Near Eastern States

No one can say with certainty precisely when men began living together in societies such as we today should recognize as antecedent to the modern state. But it so happens that the records of people who lived in the valleys of the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile between the fourth and second millenniums B.C. have been reconstructed, and that all who make up the community of nations in the second millennium A.D. can find common roots in these civilizations of the ancient Near East. For all we know, this is where writing was invented and first used as a tool for a highly organized type of community life, and where intelligence strengthened by literacy began directing man to question and eventually to order his surroundings. By assigning definite meanings first to pictures, then to shorthand versions of pictures, and finally to various forms of simplified script, men in Mesopotamia and Egypt found out how to transmit human experience accurately and impersonally to their contemporaries and to posterity. Moreover, by creating systems of numerical notation and finding other social agreements on the meanings of symbols and the values of things, they generated exact sciences such as arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. “Time” was given new significance and fitted into human planning when the Sumerians divided day and night into twelve double hours and devised the sundial and water clock for the measurement of the intervals, and when the Egyptians created the solar calendar. “Nature” was studied, evaluated, and subjected to human control when the inhabitants of the river valleys began, in the fifth millennium, to build canals, dikes, and irrigation systems. By 3000 B.C. writing was well developed, and the documents speak to us across the millenniums, telling of ancient man’s relationship to the universe and to his fellow men.

These relationships, as well as the intellectual and artistic achievements that helped to form them, were in large measure determined by the natural environment in which the people lived. Although the Nile rose and subsided in a regular rhythm, convincing the Egyptians that the gods specially cared for them, the Tigris and Euphrates would flood without notice, break dikes, and submerge crops, continually reminding the Mesopotamian that his lot was insecurity. And whereas the desert and sea kept Egypt unified and isolated from other countries until the second millennium B.C., Mesopotamia was open to contact with others from her earliest beginnings. These are some of the geographical facts that help to explain why Egypt and Mesopotamia developed different images of the world, different attitudes toward foreigners, and different principles of government.

A. Mesopotamia

The first development of urban centers in the history of mankind took place in the middle of the fourth millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia. Many villages in Sumer and Akkad expanded into cities; cities absorbed surrounding territories and became city-states. While each state relied on its own government, invoked the protection of its own gods through the mediation of its own priests, and remained forever suspicious of the governments and gods of the other states, the separate sovereignties were nevertheless unified in important respects. All were dependent on the same rivers and shared in the civilization that they had jointly created. All developed essentially identical forms of government. And in each the members of a priestly caste occupied a privileged position as advisers to the king, mediators between men and gods, and administrators of the temple estates. Apparently it was in response to their duties in these positions that they invented writing and ciphering, and developed schools in which their knowledge and monopoly over these secret crafts could be perpetuated through the education of suitable successors. Since every temple and school employed the same signs and conventions, the various priestly castes constituted, at least for intellectual and pedagogical purposes, a theological “international” across state boundaries. In the exercise of their political functions, however, they served their local deities and kings, for whose greater glory wars were fought incessantly. It is therefore no accident that the oldest legible documents are accounts of temple administrators and descriptions of frontier wars between neighboring cities.

Out of such shared realities a uniform Mesopotamian view of the world emerged on which political unification could later be founded. Since the view crystallized in the middle of the fourth millennium, along with Mesopotamian civilization itself, it was based on the forms with which men were then most familiar. It reflected the unity of the valleys, man’s earliest traditions of government, his dread of certain natural forces, and his acceptance of power as the supreme arbiter of destiny. To the Mesopotamians the cosmos was a state—an ordered system of relationships—in which all powers, all beings, all inanimate matter, and all ideas were thought to be represented according to their intrinsic worth. The criterion of differentiation was power. Just as only free men were entitled to sit in the ancient village assemblies, so only gods and those natural forces that fill mortals with awe were full citizens of the Cosmic State, exercising a decisive political influence. In the Assembly of the Deities the God of the Sky, the source of all authority, ranked the highest. Second to him, men imagined the God of the Storm, personification of a dreaded cosmic force and executor of heaven’s verdict and will. The name of the heaven-god was Anu; that of the storm, Enlil. A third deity, Ea or Enki, more sympathetic to man than either of the others and symbolized by the serpent, supervised the abyss.

Independent of any external control, the universal state appeared as the only truly sovereign polity, and the human society had to take its place as a secondary power structure within this polity. The earthly state was nothing more than the extension of the political domain of a god. A local deity serving as the deputy of Enlil administered its affairs and appointed a human steward who was in turn expected to delegate his power to lesser rulers. In man’s imagination the cosmos, the empire, the city-state, and the village were in this way organically linked in a single all-embracing view of cosmic government.

Such a philosophy of politics was a standing invitation to human bids for power. Any invasion from without or insurrection from within could be rationalized as the execution of divine will. This explains why, in the course of Mesopotamian history, Enlil’s authority was invoked effectively to justify rather different methods of conducting international affairs.

When Hammurabi subjugated all of southern Mesopotamia after ruling the small city-state of Babylon for thirty years, his success meant in cosmic terms that the city god of Babylon had been chosen by the Divine Assembly to administer the functions of Enlil, their chief executive, and that this city god had in turn delegated the functions to Hammurabi. As the great king himself explained in his famous Law Code, it was in execution of this authority that he had conquered and was now governing an empire. A millennium earlier, in the conflicts between Lagash and Umma, however, the gods had pursued a different policy. Since that boundary clash had been conceived to be a dispute between two divine landowners, the gods of Lagash and Umma, it had been taken to a divine court. Enlil, that is to say, imposed a form of arbitration through his delegate, the powerful King of Kish, who proceeded to draw the boundary line between the two city-states in a manner that had been revealed to him by his divine overlord.¹ Although the secular power of the arbitrating sovereign could have enforced compliance with this or any other award, we should not depreciate the significance of this first known case of international arbitration. On divine and human insistence a form of settlement had been chosen that played down the substance of power and achieved a solution that at least advertised the possibility of peacefully solving disputes.

The cities and states whose organization reflected the Mesopotamian world view were after all built by enterprising men in response to earthly needs and interests. Living in a country whose geographic position and natural properties invited relations with other people, the Mesopotamians had early taken to agriculture, industry, and trade as natural incidents of existence. In the pursuit of such secular objectives they regulated the flow of their rivers, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Politics and Culture in International History
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Introduction
• PART I THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST AND INDIA
• PART II THE IMPERIAL SYSTEMS OF CHINA AND ROME
• PART III CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM
• PART IV INTERNATIONAL HISTORY AND THE WORLD SOCIETY TODAY: A RECONSIDERATION OF REALITIES AND MYTHS
• Bibliography
• Index