To Rethink Standards of Civilisation,Start with the End

Introduction

Many people are willing to accept that there is a need to distinguish between states in the international system, such as on the basis of legitimacy – perhaps democratic legitimacy or the observation of certain important international norms, such as human rights or nuclear non-proliferation. The government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, for instance, and the conservative coalition that recently won power in my home country of Australia are not seen in the same light. The Syrian regime is accused of waging war against its own citizens, including using chemical weapons; this goes against most people’s idea of what a government is and what it should do for its citizens. While the Australian government is not perfect, likewise its left-leaning predecessor, they are not systematic abusers of human rights or perpetrators of war crimes. In Syria, a drawn out bloody civil war is being waged to bring down the government. A tedious campaign and entirely predictable election on 7 September 2013 was all it took to change government in Australia. In short, Australia meets certain crucial standards of civilisation and is hence seen as a legitimate member of the international community. Syria does not and therefore is not; rather, it is something of a pariah state. ¹

Like it or not, for better or worse, standards of civilisation in international society remain something of a necessary evil. That is to say, while standards have justifiably come in for considerable criticism, including the claim they are implicated in imperialism, ² as the Syria–Australia contrast highlights, standards of civilisation, or similar mechanisms, do have a role to play in world politics. In light of this, and given that standards of civilisation have been highly influential tools in the practice of international relations, it is important that the discipline of International Relations critically engages with the thinking behind standards of civilisation and investigates the ways in which standards remain relevant to the study of international relations in the 21st century. Some prominent recent discussions of standards of civilisation in IR and international law have tended to focus on what might be appropriate standards for the late 20th or early 21st centuries, ranging from human rights, democracy, economic liberalism, globalisation and modernity more generally. ³ Much of this literature is largely uncritical of the sometimes damaging consequences of standards of civilisation, insisting that the new missionary zeal for promoting human rights, democracy and economic liberalism is somehow quarantined from the ‘fatal tainting’ associated with colonial exploits and ‘abuses carried out under (and by the exponents of) the classic standard of civilization’. ⁴ Other more extensive studies have highlighted the ‘dark’ side of standards of civilisation and their role in European expansion, such as mimicking in the case of Japan, or the effects of stigmatism on foreign policy making in the case of defeated powers such as Turkey, Japan and Russia. As these studies demonstrate, there are a number of ongoing legacies that continue to impact on the conduct of international affairs. ⁵

In order to critically examine standards of civilisation, it is helpful to have a good understanding of what they are and the purpose they serve. As the term standard suggests in many contexts, they are largely about widely accepted norms and expectations, or the norm – in this case, what is required in terms of perceptions about civilised behaviour. I will shortly discuss standards of civilisation in a little more detail, but what I am more concerned with here is the second part of the question: what purpose do they serve? The key point to be made here is that while some standards of civilisation can be considered an end in themselves, they also serve a greater purpose: standards of civilisation are a means to an end. As demonstrated elsewhere, standards of civilisation are ‘one of the key tools in shaping an international society of largely uniform states’. ⁶ So if we want to rethink the place of standards of civilisation in international relations, then a good way of doing so is to rethink the end they are designed to achieve: the creation of an international society of reasonably uniform states based on a largely Western ideal-type of liberal-democracy coupled to a market economy that prefer to trade peacefully among themselves as opposed to posturing and preparing for war.

The sections that follow illuminate how and why the end of achieving a relatively peaceful, globalised and cosmopolitan world order – a ‘realistic utopia’ ⁷ – remains such a policy priority for governments of all stripes. ⁸ In order to do so, it is necessary to outline the relationship between a series of concepts central to the history and life of Western political thought. The very ideal of civilisation, and with it standards of civilisation, are intimately linked to the idea of progress, which holds that advances in fields such as science and technology, along with developments in socio-political organisation, will lead to improvements in the human condition. Theories of human progress are in turn linked to the notion of universal history, which presents the history of humankind as a whole or single coherent unit of study. This teleological account of human history returns us to the globalised, cosmopolitan ‘End of History’ that is nicely captured in the title of Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’. ⁹ It is an ideal-type of international society influenced by ideas of Kantian cosmopolitanism – a kind of foedus pacificum or pacific federation (much like the European Union but on an even larger scale) – and made up of reasonably uniform constituents. ¹⁰

Standards of Civilisation

The following definition draws on an encyclopedia entry I wrote ten years ago, and not much has changed since then. ¹¹ A standard of civilisation is a means historically used in international law to distinguish between civilised and uncivilised nations or peoples in order to determine membership in the international society of states. The concept entered international legal texts and practice in the 18th and 19th centuries under the influence of anthropologists and ethnologists who drew distinctions between civilised, barbarian and savage peoples based on their respective capacities for socio-political cooperation and organisation. Operating primarily during the European colonial period, and sometimes referred to as the classical standard of civilisation, it was a legal mechanism designed to set the benchmark for the ascent of non-European nations to the ranks of the civilised society of states. Membership in international society conferred full sovereignty upon a state, entitling it to full recognition and protection under international law.

The general test of whether a nation was deemed civilised revolved around its degree of socio-political organisation and capacity for self-government in accordance with accepted European standards. A civilised state required: a) basic institutions of government and public bureaucracy; b) organisational capacity for self-defence; c) a published legal code and adherence to the rule of law; and d) recognition of international law and norms, including those on the conduct of war and diplomatic exchange. If a nation could meet these requirements, it was generally deemed to be a legitimate sovereign state entitled to full recognition as an international personality. In essence, a government had to be sufficiently stable to allow it to enter into binding commitments under international law, and possess the will and capacity to guarantee the life, liberty and property of members of foreign civilised states living and operating within its borders.

The inability of many non-European societies to meet these criteria and the concomitant legal distinction that separated them from civilised societies led to the unequal treaty system of capitulations. The right of extraterritoriality, as it was also known, regulated relations between sovereign civilised states and quasi-sovereign uncivilised states in regard to their respective rights over, and obligations to, the citizens of civilised states living and operating in countries where capitulations were in force. In much of the non-European world this system of capitulations incrementally escalated to the point that it became the large-scale civilising missions that in turn became colonialism.

Drawing a distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ peoples was an article of faith that went largely unchallenged in the West until the mid-20th century. Not so long ago our world was thought to be reasonably neatly divided between ‘savage’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilised’ peoples. In 1877 Lewis Henry Morgan wrote: ‘It can now be asserted upon convincing evidence that savagery preceded barbarism in all tribes of mankind, as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization.’ The idea that one preceded the other, and that the ‘three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress’, ¹² is deeply related to the notion of a universal history of humankind. The distinction was not limited to anthropology, also finding expression in law and politics, such as James Lorimer’s claim that: ‘As a political phenomenon, humanity, in its present condition, divides itself into three concentric zones or spheres – that of civilised humanity, that of barbarous humanity, and that of savage humanity.’ ¹³

The rationale underpinning the emergence of the classical standard of civilisation is captured by Georg Schwarzenberger:

Once civilisation is related to the basic types of human association, it is no longer necessary to be content with the mere enumeration and description of a bewildering number of civilisations. It is then possible to evaluate and to measure individual civilisations in the light of a universally applicable test of the degree of civilisation which any such particular endeavour has attained. ¹⁴

In light of the atrocities of the Second World War, the emergence of nuclear weapons and the concept of mutually assured destruction, along with nationalist movements in many of Europe’s colonial possessions, leading jurists acknowledged that legal standards had become something of an anachronism. Hersh Lauterpacht, for instance, was critical of Lorimer’s legal schema, declaring: ‘Modern international law knows of no distinction, for the purposes of recognition, between civilised and uncivilised States or between States within and outside the international community of civilised States.’ ¹⁵

While standards of civilisation appear to be a reasonably innocuous principle, in effect legal distinctions between ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ peoples and the unavoidable interactions between them gave rise to the unequal treaty system and the right of extraterritoriality. As Charles Alexandrowicz noted: ‘International law shrank into a Euro-centric system which imposed on extra-European countries its own ideas.’ As an article of international law, the classical standard privileged the place of Europe-cum-Western civilisation as it ‘discriminated against non-European civilisations and thus ran on parallel lines with colonialism as a political trend’. ¹⁶ This is why there is some weight to claims about the chequered past of standards of civilisation in international law and/or society.

Civilisation and Progress

Jean Starobinski notes that the ‘word civilization, which denotes a process, entered the history of ideas at the same time as the modern sense of the word progress’. As such, the ‘two words were destined to maintain a most intimate relationship’. ¹⁷ The discussion above about standards of civilisation offers plenty of clues about the concept of civilisation more generally. Civilisation describes a condition of human society marked by an advanced stage of development and social complexity; key markers include urbanisation, division of labour, infrastructure, rule of law and arts, sciences and technology. Civilisation is also used to describe peoples or societies regarded as civilised. As is evident above, civilisation also refers to the process of becoming civilised: state of nature > savagery > barbarism > civilisation. ¹⁸

In a similar vein, the idea of progress has two related components. The first is that the human species universally progresses, albeit at different rates and to different degrees, from an original primitive or child-like condition, referred to as savagery, through to barbarism, and culminates at the apex of progress in the status of civilisation. The second holds that human experience, both individual and collective, is cumulative and future-directed, with the specific objective being the ongoing improvement of the individual, the society in which the individual lives, and the world in which the society must survive. As highlighted above, the capacity for reasonably complex socio-political organisation and self-government according to prevailing standards has long been regarded as a key requirement or standard of civilisation. One of the primary reasons why socio-politics is central to considerations of civilisation is evident in the following oft-quoted passage from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan:

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. ¹⁹

One of the important lessons generally drawn from this passage is that life lived outside of society in a state of nature is constantly under threat; there is little to no chance of peace among humans without society. ²⁰ A related point is that some degree of socio-political co-operation and organisation is a basic necessity for the foundation of civilisation. As Hobbes went on to explain, the ‘procuring of the necessities of life … was impossible, till the erecting of great Common-wealths’, which are ‘the mother of Peace, and Leasure’, which is, in turn, ‘the mother of Philosophy … Where first were great and flourishing Cities, there was first the study of Philosophy.’ ²¹ Thus, it is in society, and as members of society, that human beings are afforded the necessities of life that allow them to engage in the creative arts and activities that are the outward expression of civilisation. Friedrich von Schiller later posited the situation in these terms: ‘would Greece have borne a Thucydides, a Plato, and an Aristotle, or Rome a Horace, a Cicero, a Virgil, and a Livy, if these two states had not risen to those heights of political achievement which in fact they attained?’ ²² Hobbes believed not, and many thinkers before and since Hobbes’ time have agreed on the basic underlying principle.

The close relationship between civilisation and progress is evident in Robert Nisbet’s questioning of ‘whether civilization in any form and substance comparable to what we have known … in the West is possible without the supporting faith in progress that has existed along with this civilization’. ²³ He argues: ‘No single idea has been more important than … the idea of progress in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years.’ While ideas such as liberty, justice, equality and community have their rightful place and should not be discounted, Nisbet insists that, ‘throughout most of Western history, the substratum of even these ideas has been a philosophy of history that lends past, present, and future to their importance’. ²⁴ As we shall see, this is why notions such as a universal history of the species and teleological accounts of history are central to debates about the place of standards of civilisation in world affairs.

A symbiotic relationship between civilisation and progress was central to Francois Guizot’s early 19th-century analysis of Europe’s history and its civilising processes. Guizot insisted that:

the first fact comprised in the word civilisation … is the fact of progress, of development; it presents at once the idea of a people marching onward, not to change its place, but to change its condition; of a people whose culture is conditioning itself, and ameliorating itself. The idea of progress, of development, appears to me the fundamental idea contained in the word, civilization. ²⁵

Similar to Hobbes, for Guizot, socio-political progress or the harnessing of society is only part of the picture of civilisation, on the back of which: ‘Letters, sciences, the arts, display all their splendour. Wherever mankind beholds these great signs, these signs glorified by human nature, wherever it sees created these treasures of sublime enjoyment, it there recognises and names civilisation.’ For Guizot, ‘[t]wo facts’ are integral to the ‘great fact’ that is civilisation: ‘the development of social activity, and that of individual activity; the progress of society and the progress of humanity’. Wherever these ‘two symptoms’ are present, ‘mankind with loud applause proclaims civilisation’. ²⁶

The nature of the relationship between civilisation and progress lies behind Starobinski’s point that ‘civilization is a powerful stimulus to theory’. Moreover, there exists an overwhelming and irresistible ‘temptation to clarify our thinking by elaborating a theory of civilization capable of grounding a far-reaching philosophy of history’. ²⁷ J.B. Bury, in studying the history of the idea of progress, similarly proposed that the ‘idea [of progress] means that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction’. ²⁸ He went to explain that the ‘idea of human Progress then is a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future’. This theorising is grounded in an interpretation of history that regards the human condition as advancing ‘in a definite and desirable direction’. It further ‘implies that … a condition of general happiness will be ultimately enjoyed, which will justify the whole process of civilization’. ²⁹

With foundations in Christian eschatology, it is evident that the twin ideals of civilisation and progress are important factors in the Western world’s ongoing attempts to make sense of life through the articulation of a wide-reaching philosophy of history. In recent centuries it has proved irresistible to a diverse range of thinkers from across the political spectrum. In essence, the end of history is most commonly portrayed as a universal story of humankinds’ individual and social perfectibility in which the dangers and uncertainties of the Hobbesian war of all against all are left behind in favour of the relative safety and security of civil or civilised society.

Universal History

Universal history is conceived in a number of different ways, for some it is no different from world or global history in that its spatial and temporal parameters are both deep and broad. The conception of universal history that I am concerned with here is perhaps more the realm of the philosopher than the historian and is set out quite eloquently in a lecture of 1789 by Friedrich von Schiller, a man who was both:

Who would suppose that the refined European of the eighteenth century is only a more advanced brother of the Red Indian and of the Celt? All these skills, artistic instincts, experiences, all these creations of reason have been implanted and developed in man in a matter of a few thousand years; all these marvels of invention, these tremendous works of industry have been called forth from him. What brought them to life? What elicited them? What conditions of life did man traverse in ascending from that extreme to this, from the unsociable life of the cave dweller to the life of the thinker, of the civilized man of the world? Universal world-history answers these questions. ³⁰

As Schiller explained, for the adherent of universal history, ‘there extends between the present moment and the beginnings of the human race a long chain of events which interlock as cause and effect’. It is a way of thinking that ‘reverses the world-order’, for whereas the ‘real series of events descends from the origin of things to their most recent state … the universal historian moves in the opposite way from the most recent state of the world up to the origin of things’. In essence, universal history ‘imports a rational purpose into the course of the world, and a teleological principle into world-history’. ³¹ An underlying assumption is that history is a linear process that follows the passage of time: past > present > future. In contrast, Arnold Toynbee suggests the ‘illusion of progress’ as linear is another example of the human tendency to oversimplify all manner of things, including the periodisation of history ‘in a single series end to end, like the sections of a bamboo’. ³²

Despite dissenting voices, including those of Johann Gottfried Herder or conservatives like Edmund Burke, ³³ and more recent intellectual challenges from a range of perspectives, particularly post-modern and post-colonial critiques, ³⁴ the notion of universal history remains central to the Western tradition of studying and theorising about civilisation, progress and human perfectibility. It is a ‘big picture’ version of history that seeks to explain the history of humankind – savages, barbarians and civilised – as a single coherent unit of study. ³⁵ It is about fitting all peoples and places into the narrative of history, which means placing them somewhere on a continuum between the poles of savagery and civilisation, ³⁶ at the same time knowing that all will ultimately arrive at the same end: civilisation, or universal civilisation.

We find as much in Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’:

If one follows the influence of Greek history on the construction of and misconstruction of the Roman state which swallowed up the Greek, then the Roman influence on the barbarians who in turn destroyed it, and so on down to our own times; if one adds episodes from the national histories of other peoples insofar as they are known from the history of the enlightened nations, one will discover a regular progress in the constitution of states on our continent (which will probably give law, eventually, to all others). ³⁷

In contrast to Kant, his one-time student, Herder, was sceptical of the idea of universal history and the prominent place of Europe in the world. Herder wondered: ‘Is not the good dispersed all over earth?’ Surely, ‘it could not be encompassed by one face of humankind, by one region of the compass’. Rather, it is ‘dispersed in a thousand faces, ever changing – an eternal Proteus – through all continents and centuries’. In short, Herder questioned ‘why should the western extremity of our Northern Hemisphere [Western Europe] alone be the home of civilisation? And is that really so?’ ³⁸ He was convinced neither by the idea of history as the universal linear march of humankind towards perfection, nor by the idea of cyclical history, nor by the more sceptical notion that the passage of history is nothing but chaos or chance. As he saw it, progress could not be guaranteed, for he noted that ‘civilized states may develop where’ once it was deemed virtually impossible, and that ‘civilized states wither, though we considered them immortal’. ³⁹ Rather, for Herder reason is manifold in that human nature does not universally conform to the scientific modelling proposed by many Enlightenment thinkers. ⁴⁰ His philosophy of history is contingent on the plurality of diverse cultures and societies that make up the species. Speculations on the degree of progress or specific achievements of different peoples should therefore be analysed in the relevant context, and not abstracted from their all-important cultural grounding.

Despite the various critiques, conceptions of universal history, such as that outlined by Schiller, remain pervasive and persuasive in the 21st century. David Christian, for instance, a pioneer of ‘Big History’, recently predicted ‘that over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of “universal history”; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods.’ ⁴¹ The suggestion that a new wave of universal history that is ‘global’ and ‘scientific’ will avoid the shortcomings of earlier accounts of universal history seems to miss the point that they too either claimed or aspired to being global and scientific by applying new scientific approaches associated with disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology to the study of the many and varied peoples of the world. ⁴²

Prime among these shortcomings is that highlighted by Georg Iggers, whereby common to most philosophies of progress or history ‘is the concept of the unity of man’s history’, which further necessitates ‘the conception that civilization is one and universal’, that is, that there is but ‘one world history’. As he explains, historically, Europe, and ‘specifically France and the English-speaking world’ represent ‘the vanguards of civilization’; the ‘history of mankind’ is therefore thought to be ‘identical with the history of Western civilization’. ⁴³ For many Enlightenment theorists of progress and their heirs, ‘the history of the West becomes ultimately the history of the non-West, as the West extends it hegemony over the world’. Thus, the non-Western ‘world will find the completion of its historical development not in the further development of its own heritage but, because its heritage represents an earlier phase in the progress of mankind, in total Europeanization’. ⁴⁴ Standards of civilisation are an all-important tool in this process.

Another German scholar of history, Oswald Spengler, similarly highlights that, in this view of history and the world, the ‘Western European area’ came to be ‘regarded as a fixed pole, a unique patch chosen on the surface of the sphere for no better reason, it seems, than because we live on it’. Moreover, ‘great histories of millennial duration and mighty faraway Cultures are made to revolve around this pole in all modesty’. It is from and in relation to this privileged corner of the globe, and its successor the West, that all other peoples and events came to be ‘judged in perspective’, ⁴⁵ according to their place on the continuum of universal history. As John Hobson has recently forcefully demonstrated, this kind of Eurocentrism similarly blights much of the discipline of International Relations as carried out in the West during the past 250 years. ⁴⁶

The Cosmo-political Plan

Kant remains an influential figure on contemporary cosmopolitan thought, as he does for liberal international theory. Martha Nussbaum asserts that ‘Kant, more influentially than any other Enlightenment thinker, defended a politics based on reason rather than patriotism or group sentiment, a politics that was truly universal rather than communitarian’. ⁴⁷ For Kant, the ‘universal cosmopolitan condition’ is the end ‘which Nature has as her ultimate purpose’; ⁴⁸ it is an end that very much resembles the ideal of ‘Perpetual Peace’. In ‘Idea for a Universal History’, he writes that the ‘highest purpose of Nature’ is realisable only in a ‘society with the greatest freedom’ under a ‘perfectly just civic constitution’ ⁴⁹ – a republican constitution. This is re-emphasised in ‘Perpetual Peace’, where Kant states that the ‘only constitution which derives from the idea of the original compact, and on which all juridical legislation of a people must be based, is the republican’. It is based on the ‘principles of the freedom of the members of a society (as men)’; the ‘principles of dependence of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects)’; and ‘the law of their equality (as citizens)’. ⁵⁰ The question for Kant is: is the republican constitution ‘also the one which can lead to perpetual peace?’ He affirms that indeed the ‘republican constitution, besides the purity of its origin … also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, i.e., perpetual peace’. The ‘reason is this: if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing themselves all the calamities of war’. ⁵¹

Moreover, peace between republican states is assured because, in a ‘league of nations, even the smallest state could expect security and justice, not from its own power and by its own decrees, but only from this great league of nations (Foedus Amphictyonum), from a united power acting according to decisions reached under the laws of their united will’. Kant adds that ‘however fantastical this idea may seem, and it was laughed at’ as such ‘by Abbé de St. Pierre and by Rousseau, perhaps because they believed it was too near to realization’, states are ultimately compelled ‘to give up their brutish freedom and to seek quiet and security under a lawful constitution’. In essence, then, Kant held that the spread of the republican form of government, the extension of trading relations between republican states, and the observation of international law amongst them were the most likely means of securing an orderly and peaceful international society. The further these civilising conditions spread, the greater the likelihood and reach of an increasingly peaceful world order, or what Kant called ‘a universal cosmopolitan condition’. ⁵²

The prospect for world peace is in part based on Kant’s assertion that republican or democratically elected leaders are required ‘to take their peoples’ pacific preferences into consideration before going to war’. But more than that, Lars-Erik Cederman argues that, for Kant, the ‘effect of democracy is not limited to this simple cost–benefit mechanism’; rather, Kant ‘sees no reason why the upward spread of norms has to stop at the democratic state’s borders’. As Cederman puts it, once the ‘pathway of normative progress is opened, the rule of law will creep into interstate relations’, which obviates or at least reduces the tendency to resort to threats and or violent confrontation. ⁵³ In this Kant is an important source of the argument that the nature of politics practised at the domestic level is a key influence on the manner in which states conduct politics at the international level. ⁵⁴ In Kant’s terms, if there is ‘more charity and less strife’ in the ‘body politic’, then ‘eventually this will also extend to nations in their external relations toward one another up to the realization of the cosmopolitan society’. ⁵⁵ Furthermore, just as the ‘antagonism’ among men in society, or what Kant calls their ‘unsocial sociability’, is, ‘in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men’, ⁵⁶ Bruce Buchan makes the similar point that, ‘for Kant, the mutually antagonistic relations between states in the international state of nature would thrust the civilizing process onto the global stage’. ⁵⁷

Making Modernity

Couze Venn observes that the idea that the multitude of ‘very different cultures’ that constitute our globe ‘could converge towards a cosmopolitan sameness is inseparable from the twinned birth of European colonialism and modernity’. That is, throughout much of their respective histories, both the practice of colonialism and the concept of modernity have inextricable links to the ‘conceptualization of history as the universal and rational’ progression of humankind onward and upward towards perfectibility. In short, ‘Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism [are] intrinsic to the discourse of modernity’. A key element of the project of modernity is the proliferation of the modern state and its institutions – the very building blocks of the international system. As Venn argues, in Enlightenment thought, ‘a notion of the nation-state emerges as the central organizing principle for constructing the new progressive community’. ⁵⁸ This is a view that is advanced by a good many Enlightenment thinkers; it is inherent in Kant and receives its strongest statement of endorsement from Georg Hegel. As Ranajit Guha put it, for Hegel, ‘no state [meant] no history’. ⁵⁹

Given that the state is pretty much the norm as a means of aggregating and governing peoples, most recent scholarship on standards of civilisation takes the state for granted and focuses on the form and nature of state governance mechanisms. Gerrit Gong, for instance, raises the idea of a ‘standard of modernity’ as a successor to the classical standard, ⁶⁰ whereby modernity equates to the Western world and the principles of capitalism and liberal democracy. For aspiring ‘backward’, ‘developing’ or ‘pre-modern’ states, there is only one road to modernisation or modernity: Western-style development. The transition from ‘underdeveloped’ to ‘developed’ entails a shift away from ‘traditional’ means of subsistence to the application of ‘scientific’ methods to virtually all aspects of life. ⁶¹ In the tradition of universal history and modernisation theory, there is a widely held belief that, in the march of human progress, human rights, democracy and Western-style modernity are so interdependent that they cannot be separated. David Landes, for instance, claims that not all cultures ‘are equally suited to successful high productivity in a material sense’. The unsuited are described as ‘toxic cultures which handicap the people who cling to them’. He contends that while these people may draw ‘all the consolation they want’ from their culture, in the end ‘it handicaps them in their ability to compete in a modern world’. ⁶²

David Fidler similarly advocates an economically liberal standard of civilisation that conflates human rights, democracy and economically globalised liberal modernity. The direction he sees the standard as heading towards is what he terms a ‘standard of liberal, globalized civilization’, which comes about through parallel or concurrent ‘standards of civilization and globalization’. Just as the classical ‘standard of civilization required the creation and maintenance of certain conditions that would allow Westerners to conduct commerce and trade safely and effectively in non-Western countries’, so does the standard of globalisation. ⁶³ In essence, the ‘confluence of the standards of civilization and globalization at the end of the twentieth century produces the composite standard of liberal, globalized, civilization’. ⁶⁴ In the same vein, Mehdi Mozaffari suggests that ‘the rise of a “global standard of civilization” reflects the transformation of the world’ that is currently taking place under the ‘ongoing process of globalization’, which ‘has considerably reduced the differences between various [competing] world visions’. ⁶⁵

In regard to economic globalisation and globalisation more generally, Anthony Pagden notes that ‘the world economy, which has come to constitute a new kind of human environment’, is also a creation of Western cosmopolitan culture, and therefore ‘belonging to that environment demands signing up to its political and social values as well’. Furthermore, it is difficult to separate Western cosmopolitan culture from its imperial moorings when one considers that ‘the entire development project’, as carried out by the West in the ‘underdeveloped’ non-Western world, continues to be motivated by the notions of ‘humanity’ and ‘benevolence’ that justified standards of civilisation and civilising missions of old. ⁶⁶

There is another dimension to this argument that questions the origins or genealogy of Western modernity and with it the sources of globalisation. However, for every Martin Bernal questioning the roots of Western civilisation and proposing an Afroasiatic alternative, there are a handful of scholars arguing for the maintenance of the traditional and more widely accepted account of Western civilisation’s Greek heritage. ⁶⁷ Similarly, for every John Hobson arguing that the ‘deceptively seductive Eurocentric view is false’, and that the ‘East (which was more advanced than the West between 500 and 1800) provided a crucial role in enabling the rise of modern Western civilisation’, ⁶⁸ there are a handful like Landes who insist ‘the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity’. ⁶⁹ Included here are Charles Murray, who has followed up on Nisbet’s claims about progress and the primacy of the West in an endeavour to empirically ‘prove’ that the premise is ‘objectively true’, ⁷⁰ which is why the ‘West has won’, or so some claim. ⁷¹

Conclusion

As Naeem Inayatullah and David Blaney highlight, the seemingly ‘competing impulses to divide and separate or unify and homogenize seem to go hand in hand’. ⁷² And this is precisely what standards of civilisation are designed to do: at first they divide and separate, then comes either exclusion or coercion to conform. Standards of civilisation have long been a means of intervening in the affairs of other peoples, often in the name of inclusion. Interventions range from minor tinkering to wholesale social, legal, cultural and political engineering; from systems of capitulations or rights of extraterritoriality to full-blown colonisation; from structural adjustment programmes to large-scale humanitarian intervention. Standards of civilisation have played a prominent role in shaping the international states system and the making of history more generally; they are one of the key tools in crafting a ‘predictive history’, as envisaged by Kant. In short, standards of civilisation have been and remain a relatively efficient and effective means of making modernity, an increasingly liberal, globalised, cosmopolitan modernity.

So what is wrong with this? As stated above, standards of civilisation remain something of a necessity; we need to be able to distinguish in some way, shape or from between more or less legitimate governments. That said, while we might recognise the need for the means, we do not necessarily have to go along with the ends. I for one am more inclined to share the views of Herder and Spengler than those of Schiller and Kant. Like Herder, I am not convinced by the idea of history as the universal linear march of humankind towards cosmopolitan perfection, or that the history of the West is also the history of the non-Western world. My point here is not to denigrate the achievements of Western civilisation, as some critics rush to accuse one of any time they pause, reflect and engage in a bout of self-assessment. Rather, it is important to highlight that there are manifold ways of living in this world; diversity is a good thing, on both the micro and macro levels.

In his posthumously published memoires, the French statesman, writer and historian François-René de Chateaubriand paused to reflect towards the end of his life:

What would a universal society without individual lands look like, which would be neither French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Turkish, Persian, Indian, Chinese, or American, or rather would be all of those societies at once? What would be the effect on morality, the sciences, the arts, poetry? How would the passions felt by different peoples in different climes be simultaneously expressed? How would that confusion of needs and images, the product of different lands where the sun lit a common youth, maturity, and old age be grasped by language? And which language would it be? Will a universal idiom result from the fusion of societies, where some dialect serves for daily transactions, while each nation continues to speak its own language, or perhaps the various languages will be understood by all? What common government, what single set of laws would embrace that society? How would one find space on an earth enlarged by the power of ubiquity, yet shrunk to the smaller proportions of a globe everywhere explored? It would only remain to demand of science some means of transferring to another planet. ⁷³

There is no need to go to such lengths as colonising another planet to find space for the expression of difference and to make room for social, political and cultural pluralism, even economic pluralism.

It is at this point where the competing pluralist and solidarist branches within the English School can offer valuable guidance. ⁷⁴ As the label suggests, pluralists are inclined to be open to a diverse range of views on the good life and how society ought to be organised. Hedley Bull, for instance, saw no desperate need for socio-cultural recognition or compatibility, instead arguing that a pluralist international society merely requires that its members are sovereign and willing to engage in diplomacy. ⁷⁵ In contrast, in the solidarist conception of international society, membership is based on observation of largely Western values, which leads to arguments that the international community ought to do more to promote human rights and well-being in general, even if it means intervening in the affairs of other states. ⁷⁶ If standards of civilisation are to play an important role in the conduct of 21st century international relations and avoid the imperial overtones of the classical standard, then they need to be guided by a more pluralist outlook and limit their concerns to the micro, such as the conduct of the government in Syria, rather than the macro, such as rebuilding Syrian society in line with a particular model such that it serves a greater end.

In essence, standards of civilisation are of most value if we think of them as an operating system that allows different states or societies of states or regional blocs to communicate and facilitate various forms of exchange or doing business. We are better off collectively when standards are more minimalist. So long as there are sufficient similarities and overlaps in the operating systems employed, let’s say the software, the hardware does not have to all look alike. The units that make up the system do not all need to be white, slim and sleek. We do not all have to be Apples when we can be apples, oranges or whatever. There is ample room here on Earth for diversity; there is no need to look to other planets just yet.