Saturday, September 17, 2016
UPDATE TO POST BELOW THE WEST VERSUS THE REST UNFOLDING
BACKLASH AGAINST THE WEST FROM DISMANTLING COLONIALISM AND CIVILIZATIONALISM
They also, among Western nations, have been the most blind to civilizational and economic overtones and initiatives in the international system they promulgated since WWI."
So, why did I put it this way, in my comment on DK's current post?
What, about colonialism, was worth having, or preserving?
My answer is: almost all of it.
Why?
First off, let's just point out what we got, and what we forget, about American colonialism: we got most all of America by imperializing and colonizing against both the native people, the French whom we fought here for centuries, the Spanish, and then Mexico.
We then bought another large chunk, the Louisiana Purchase, (admittedly not colonialism, but imperialistic nonetheless) from the French, desperate in the Napoleonic Wars.
Update:
What else can one allude to, briefly, to explain so supposedly aberrant a view?
Let's just mention the Russo Japanese War of 1904, 1905.
Even someone so establishment as Blanning, Editor, The Short Oxford History Of Europe, The Nineteenth Century, Introduction, acknowledges that this was certainly a warning sign that the balance of power between Europe (the West) and the rest of the world was changing.
Most people back then, of course, did not even think of that relationship as one involving what Blanning now calls a balance of power at all.
But the leaders of the Great Powers knew that something somehow momentous had happened.
Not that Russia was a truly Western Power, then or now, but everyone, even then, acknowledged it as a Great Power.
So, what was this momentous thing that had happened?
A non Western Power had developed industrially and socially so quickly, since only the mid 19th century, that it was able to overcome a Great Power in a modern military conflict.
Blanning characterized it as the first few pebbles falling, in what with WWI would become a landslide in 1914.
As he says, it signaled a changing of the balance of power, already then under way in 1905, between the West and the rest, for which 1914 was indeed then a civilizational landslide in that balance.
Update:
What else can one allude to, briefly, to explain so supposedly aberrant a view?
Let's just mention the Russo Japanese War of 1904, 1905.
Even someone so establishment as Blanning, Editor, The Short Oxford History Of Europe, The Nineteenth Century, Introduction, acknowledges that this was certainly a warning sign that the balance of power between Europe (the West) and the rest of the world was changing.
Most people back then, of course, did not even think of that relationship as one involving what Blanning now calls a balance of power at all.
But the leaders of the Great Powers knew that something somehow momentous had happened.
Not that Russia was a truly Western Power, then or now, but everyone, even then, acknowledged it as a Great Power.
So, what was this momentous thing that had happened?
A non Western Power had developed industrially and socially so quickly, since only the mid 19th century, that it was able to overcome a Great Power in a modern military conflict.
Blanning characterized it as the first few pebbles falling, in what with WWI would become a landslide in 1914.
As he says, it signaled a changing of the balance of power, already then under way in 1905, between the West and the rest, for which 1914 was indeed then a civilizational landslide in that balance.
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