Before the eighteenth century, then, and insofar as there was an antonym to what was already by then the venerable collective category of “barbarian,” it was not another generalized solidarity, but a sequence of place- and time-specific societies and cultures, whether it be ancient Greece, imperial Rome, Christian Europe, or Renaissance Italy. As such, “barbarian” was an identity, and generally an inferiority, ascribed to successive alien groups by those regarding themselves as “superior.” The latter felt no need to define themselves collectively, only to describe and disparage those whom they regarded as a hostile, threatening, and predatory “other,” and in so doing they projected onto successive cohorts of “barbarians” a shared identity and a common consciousness that was not necessarily felt or accepted. They also furnished historical accounts of barbarian development, and delivered moral judgments on barbarian behavior, which were at best oversimplified and at worst deeply misleading. “Each man,” Montaigne rightly observed, “calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”8 During the second half of the eighteenth century, however, these asymmetrical polarities and identities were transformed by the more balanced and all-encompassing antithesis between “barbarism” and “civilization,” and this new formulation received its most celebrated, influential, and enduring (but also misunderstood and misapplied) elaboration from Edward Gibbon, to whom we now return.
CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM
As befitted a work of Enlightenment rationality indebted to contemporary Scottish thinkers, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was constructed around contrasts, antitheses, and dichotomies, of which two were particularly significant. The first was between “pagans” and “Christians,” but the second was that between the civilized Romans and the barbarian hordes beyond their borders, who would eventually overwhelm and vanquish the empire. “In the second century of the Christian era,” Gibbon famously began his opening chapter, “the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”9 As he saw it, Rome had conferred upon a large portion of humanity a unique blend of civic virtue and personal freedom, the blessings of order, justice, prosperity, and individual rights, and an unrivaled cultural heritage of poetry, oratory, history, philosophy, and art; and the word that he used to describe that achievement in its entirety was the very one that Dr. Johnson had recently rejected, namely “civilization.” For Gibbon, bar-barism was the negation of civilization, and he equated it with savagery. The Goths, for instance, were pastoral nomads, they had no notion of fixed, landed property, nor of the laws required to regulate it, and they were “unacquainted with the use of letters,” which meant that, far from being a “civilized people,” they were merely a “herd of savages, incapable of knowledge or reflection,” and they were naturally inclined to war. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Gibbon did not learn German, because he thought it was too “barbarous” a language.)10
Yet despite the immeasurable superiority of Rome, neither its vast empire nor its remarkable achievements were lastingly established, for according to Gibbon, their imperium was overwhelmed not only by “Christianity,” which vanquished “paganism,” but also by “barbarism,” which triumphed over “civilization.” During the late fourth century, he argued, external pressure on Rome’s distant frontiers, which was itself in response to the invasive force exerted farther east by the Huns, became irresistible, as the Goths crossed the Danube in 376 CE, and defeated the imperial legions at Adrianople two years later. But this was only the beginning: in the first decade of the fifth century, the Vandals forded the Rhine into the empire, and subsequently advanced over the Pyrenees into Spain, and the Goths invaded Italy, sacking Rome in 410. There was worse to come: the Vandals captured Carthage in 439, they pillaged Rome sixteen years later, and the last emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476. Within scarcely a hundred years, according to Gibbon, “the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of barbarians”; new kingdoms were established by the Visigoths in Spain and southern Gaul, by the Franks in northern Gaul, by the Ostrogoths in Italy, and by the Vandals in North Africa; the once-great city of Rome was left a shattered and wasted ruin; and “the barriers which had so long separated the savage and the civilized nations of the earth were … leveled to the ground.”11
For Gibbon, the outcome of this titanic but unequal struggle between the opposed identities of civilization and barbarism was a huge regression in the course of human history, as the western Roman Empire fell victim to the “vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.” The crude, brutal Germanic tribes had obliterated the hard-won gains of Graeco-Latin civilization, and their devastating intrusions and destructive conquests had ushered in a dark age of ruin and decay, from which it took Europe centuries to recover. For Gibbon, these terrible times were characterized in the West by the “lowest ebb of primitive barbarism” among the empire’s successor kingdoms, while in the East the wounded, beleaguered empire of Byzantium somehow survived, even though Gibbon regarded it as being incorrigibly moribund, parochial, and corrupt—so much so that its later history presented “a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery.” There might be occasional revivals and reconquests, as under the emperor Justinian, but its long-term trajectory was toward oblivion, as its dominions were eroded by successive waves of eastern barbarians: by the Persians, the Slavs, the Arabs, by Seljuk Turks, and eventually by the Ottoman Turks, who vanquished the “second Rome” when they sacked Constantinople in 1453.12
Yet for all its apparent heroic simplicities, Gibbon’s dichotomy of civilized and barbarian was (like his polarity of pagan and Christian) hedged with many caveats and qualifications that have often been overlooked. To begin with, and as befitted someone of his ironic disposition, he never believed that the Romans were unreservedly virtuous and that the barbarians were utterly without redeeming qualities. As he saw it, the high point of Roman civilization had come in the earlier time of the republic, whereas the later eras of imperial despotism were characterized by “immoderate greatness,” when corruption, luxury, excess, and enervation weakened resolve, sapped liberty, and subverted freedom.13 Not surprisingly, Gibbon sometimes conceded that decayed and degenerate Rome both needed and deserved to be vanquished then reinvigorated by the hordes pressing inexorably on the empire’s borders, which might be savage and warlike, but which were also brave, energetic, and, in their own fashion, believers in the sort of freedom on which Rome had long since given up. Thus understood, the central paradox of The Decline and Fall was that the barbarians invaded and conquered a great empire only to find that they in turn were overwhelmed by the idea of a civilization that they had seemingly vanquished, but that they eventually reenergized and renewed and liberated.14 The result was a gradual evolution from “primitive barbarism” to “the full tide of modern civilization,” which meant the Europe of Gibbon’s time was “secure from any future irruption of barbarism,” and that the threat it had represented was over—at least on his own continent, although not necessarily elsewhere.15
Moreover, while Rome may for a time have embodied “civilization,” Gibbon recognized that it was neither monolithic nor unchanging, and he preferred the republic’s spirited freedom to the “immoderate greatness” of the empire or the decayed lethargy of Byzantium.16 Nor did the coherence of his other and opposing category of “barbarian” hold up to closer scrutiny, for the external forces that assailed and eventually destroyed the empire came in varied and distinct guises, in terms of their origins, aims, behavior, and beliefs. There were those emanating from Asia, successively the Huns under Attila, the Mongols under Genghis Khan, and the Timurids under Tamerlane, whose westward expansion put powerful indirect pressure on the boundaries of the empire. There were the Vandals, the Franks, the Visigoths, and the Ostrogoths, who in retreating before Attila’s Asiatic hordes smashed their way through the borders of the Western Empire, bringing chaos and ruin, even thoug
h eventually followed by freedom and liberty. Finally, there were the Persians, the Arabs, and the Turks, who assailed the Roman Empire on its eastern frontiers: they were more inclined to enervation, corruption, and oriental despotism than their vigorous northern counterparts, and in the case of the Arabs, they were also powerfully motivated by a crusading religion. From this more nuanced Gibbonian perspective, “barbarian” was too simplistic a collective category to encompass all Rome’s many enemies across a thousand years, for as their varied histories and attributes suggested, they possessed no shared sense of unity, identity, mission, or purpose.17
On closer inspection, then, Gibbon’s celebrated dichotomy between the collective identities of “civilization” and “barbarism” was less clear-cut than a cursory reading of The Decline and Fall might suggest, yet since his day, the same polarities and warring antagonisms have been projected in many times and places. For the Comte de Ségur, the French ambassador to the court of Catherine the Great, the identities Gibbon had discerned in the world of late antiquity were still in being, but they were now to be found in Russia, where the westward-facing capital of St. Petersburg was a confused amalgam of “the age of barbarism and that of civilization, the tenth and the eighteenth centuries, the manners of Asia and those of Europe.”18 But for the Chinese emperor Qianlong, receiving a British delegation led by Lord Macartney in 1793, it was the Europeans who were the barbarians, whereas the Asiatics were civilized. He was unimpressed by the gifts and gadgets Macartney brought as an indication of his nation’s technological superiority, and he dismissed George III’s “humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilization.” Macartney’s delegation thought the Chinese arrogant, xenophobic, authoritarian, and backward, but the Chinese remained convinced they were the civilized ones and that the Europeans (like everyone else beyond their own borders) were the savages. Six decades later, in the aftermath of the destruction by the British and the French of the Old Summer Palace in imperial Peking, an outraged and embarrassed Victor Hugo offered another variant: “We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.”19
But Gibbon’s resonant, if oversimplified, dichotomy was not only extended, adapted, and even reversed during the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: it was also stripped of its adversarial aspects by those who insisted that barbarism and civilization were not antagonistic identities locked in a mortal Manichean conflict, but were the extreme positions on a continuous and continuing spectrum of political, social, intellectual, moral, and aesthetic development. They were not Gibbon’s clashing aggregations, doomed to primordial and perpetual confrontation; rather, they were the beginning and end points of the long journey of human evolution. Reformulated in this way, civilization was not a collective and embattled entity, always at war with the barbarians, but a continuing process, which had reached its zenith with the advanced nations of nineteenth-century Europe. It was this view that underlay such works as François Guizot’s Histoire de la civilisation en Europe and his Histoire de la civilisation en France, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, and H. T. Buckle’s Introduction to the History of Civilization in England.20 It was this sense of ultimate attainment on the part of some Europeans that also inspired the “civilizing mission” of nineteenth-century imperialism, where the avowed aim was to lift up those peoples at a lower stage of human development.21 And this view achieved its fullest articulation in the work of the émigré sociologist Norbert Elias, who published The Civilizing Process in German in 1939, the very year when it seemed to many that that process had come to a terrible halt.22
Because of the strong claims made to it by France and Britain, and sometimes by Italy, European “civilization” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not necessarily encompass the whole continent, and the relations of the German-speaking peoples to the concept and the collectivity remained in question. From one perspective, deriving from a careful reading of The Decline and Fall, there were Germans who took pride in not being “civilized” at all. For Johann Gottfried von Herder, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and developing an argument Gibbon had made only en passant, it was the Teutonic “barbarians” who had been brave, energetic, and freedom-loving: they were “northern giants, to whom the enervated Romans appeared as dwarfs; they ravaged Rome, and infused new life into expiring Italy.”23 Thereafter, many German writers and politicians followed Herder, insisting it was the so-called barbarians who had always been the morally superior peoples, plucking the lamp of civilization away from decadent and declining Rome; and this inverted dichotomy was widely embraced by late-nineteenth-century German scholars, who saw the Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic race as the great energizing and reforming force in Western history, sweeping away Latin degeneracy and corruption. The same interpretation was advanced in Britain by Thomas Hodgkin, a Quaker banker and historian, whose Italy and Her Invaders appeared a century after The Decline and Fall. Hodgkin was more sympathetic to German language and culture than Gibbon, and he urged that Gibbon had underestimated the achievements of the “barbarians” in transforming a decaying empire into thriving and vigorous kingdoms.24
From another perspective, however, the collective German superiority over western European civilization in the nineteenth century did not derive from the greater vigor of “barbarism” in opposition to “civilization,” but from the greater refinement of “Kultur,” which articulated identities in intellectual, artistic, and spiritual terms, compared to Anglo-French “Zivilisation,” which was deemed to be more concerned with (baser) political, social, and economic matters. For Friedrich Nietzsche, writing a commentary revealingly entitled Kultur contra Zivilisation, “Civilisation is altogether something different than Culture will allow: it is perhaps its inverse.” And civilization was also its inferior: as Thomas Mann later put it, “culture equals true spirituality, while civilization means mechanization.”25 Thus regarded, German “Kultur” was greatly superior to European (which meant essentially Anglo-French-Italian) “civilization.” Not surprisingly, those who were placed on the far side of this divide did not agree, even when certain military and political events seemed to justify such an ordering. When Victor Hugo, who was not unaware of the ambiguities of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism,” addressed the French National Assembly in 1871, following his nation’s recent crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, he insisted on contrasting the “barbarism” of German “Kultur” with the “light” that was French civilization, which meant for Hugo that despite France’s military humbling and humiliation, it was still the superior nation.26
By the end of the nineteenth century, the European categories and identities relating to civilization were thus so varied and inconsistent as to be far beyond Gibbon’s initial, resonant, and easily vulgarized identities and antitheses of civilized or barbarian. And yet these basic terms were frequently resorted to and constantly reworked by the belligerents during the First World War, which would see a multiplication of identity rhetoric, behavioral stereotyping, and opposing groups, but all of them founded on the same simple dichotomy.27 The leaders and propagandists of the Anglo-French Entente insisted they were fighting to defend Christian European “civilization” from the aggression, pillage, and ruin of the Austrian and German “barbarians,” who were, after all, descended from the Goths and the Huns, and from whom decency and chivalry could thus not be expected. When Britain and France were (belatedly) joined by Italy, the argument was further strengthened that the Entente was the embodiment and defender of European civilization. As their governments put it in a note of January 1917 addressed to President Woodrow Wilson, among their war aims was “the expulsion from Europe of the Ottoman Empire, which has proved itself so radically alien to Western civilization.” But this was only an incoherent formulation, since for much of the war, the British, French, and Italians were also allied with the Russians, and the Slavs had often been regarded by i
nhabitants of western Europe as “barbarians,” not least by Queen Victoria herself.28
The wartime propaganda of the Austrians and the Germans was no less contradictory. Projecting one familiar collective identity, they insisted they were fighting to defend their “Kultur,” which was more important and admirable than Anglo-French “civilization”; but they also contended that Anglo-French “civilization” had become decadent and degenerate, in need of being vanquished, to be revived—a bracing and historic dose of Teutonic “barbarism” rather than of “Kultur” was their prescription. (This had earlier been Nietzsche’s plea and prediction, before he lapsed into madness in the 1890s.)29 And so both the Entente and the Central Powers saw the latter as the side of “barbarism” during the First World War. But the identity had diametrically opposed moral and behavioral terms to each: it meant virtue and vigor from a German-speaking perspective, the embodiment of everything vile and violent according to the British, the French, and the Italians. Either way, Gibbon’s confident prediction that barbarism no longer represented an external threat to European civilization had been confounded from within. Instead of being “irruptions” from beyond the continent, the barbarians were now as much inside Europe as outside, though the implications were not immediately recognized. Writing ten years after the Armistice, Clive Bell noted that “since from August 1914 to November 1918 Great Britain and her allies were fighting for civilization, it cannot, I suppose, be impertinent to inquire precisely what civilization may be.” Yet there was little geographical or historical precision in the pages that followed, and Bell fell back on a familiar and glib appropriation from The Decline and Fall: “no characteristic of a barbarous society can possibly be a peculiarity of civilized societies.”30
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